NYAB Event - Megan Craig "Lines of Flight"

Megan Craig "Lines of Flight"

Sundaram Tagore Gallery

This event has ended.

The title of this show comes from a phrase coined by Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher whose work I have been recently reading and teaching. Deleuze is important to my work as a painter insofar as he thinks seriously about the distinctive materiality of color and the value of indeterminacy. Deleuze uses "lines of flight" to indicate horizontals, verticals, and diagonals that chart movement. Such "lines" are not distinct roads or rails one might navigate or follow; they are the expressions of invisible forces and zones of ambiguous tension. Multiple spaces open in between, across, within the spaces we inhabit and know how to navigate – there are worlds within worlds and forces pulling in myriad directions through even the most inanimate objects. Like the vapor trails of a thousand jets, lines of flight activate and reconfigure space.

My paintings explore experimental spaces that have yet to be mapped or traveled, fields of color and the cavernous holes between strokes. Although my work derives concretely from immersion in cityscapes and the architecture of crowded spaces, these new paintings do not depict factual places. Instead, they reinvent and remember the stoic weight of monolithic buildings, the dynamic rise of city skylines, the life of bricks, the tensions between the still and the moving, the concrete and the abstract, the natural and the artificial. Every paint stroke generates a new line of flight. The accumulation of marks generates ambiguous spaces with multiple centers of gravity, a propagation of intricacies, cities within cities. Painting has a special ability to express the forces emanating from within sedentary objects – buildings, books, junk – the erosive weight of time, the explosive thrust of joy, the ways things bend and buckle, rise and resist. These paintings describe such forces and their pre-articulate, visceral moods: pinched, tense, shy, poised, yellow, pink, free, fast, and jubilant.

- Megan Craig