John Wells "Ave Lux"
Honey Space
This event has ended.
Honey Space presents Ave Lux, an exhibition of four 60-foot long scrolls created by John Wells between 1972 and 1982, and revisited in 2009. Begun in his 20's, and still occupying his attention at the age of 60, the scrolls represent a life's enduring fascinations- a trove of motifs, ideas, and sensibilities that have maintained their relevance for the artist over the course of a lifetime, and remain as singular and contemporary today as the time when they were first created.
In 1972, as a young artist in New York, John Wells discovered five rolls of Star Profile Drafting paper for sale in a bin in front of Arthur Brown and Brothers. He carried them home to his unheated apartment on West 92nd street, and soon thereafter began work on the first scroll. The scrolls are built upon the existing grid of the drafting paper, which provides an underlying structure for the repeating patterns, text and images that play out over the scrolls as a whole. Created on a makeshift worktable, with only six feet of the rolls visible at any given time, the visual arc of the final works was something that even the artist couldn't visualize or anticipate until they were unrolled at the very end. Installed in the round in Honey Space's current configuration, the works are a true tour de force, defining their own sacred space on the western edge of New York City.
In 2009, John Wells revisited the scrolls, adding a border of text from the Treatise on the Triple Epiphany, a 2nd-century Gnostic text.
During the course of the exhibition, John Wells will be present in the gallery, at work on current paintings at a table installed for the show, and interacting with the public.
Media
Schedule
from May 14, 2009 to June 13, 2009