"In a Violet Distance" Exhibition
Zürcher Gallery
This event has ended.
This exhibition is a reflection on looking ; each work represents somebody looking at some thing or another person in ways that tangle that act with remembering, imagining and making. The protagonists in these paintings, drawings and sculpture are themselves spectators that put our role into a shifting light.
Violet is the color of bruises and royalty while it harmonizes in English with the words violent and violin. The word is redolent with poetic usage even as the hue is logically located on the color wheel between red and blue, or invisibly, as the short wavelength that burns our skin and bleaches our watercolors. We remain safe, though, at an inviolate distance to contemplate Bollinger, Chu, Desgrandchamps, Dufresne, Humphrey, McMurray, Schwontkowski and Worth’s crafted allegories of looking.
The people in Bollinger’s drawings often merge into the subject of their gaze just as Dufresne’s figure peers through goggles as she deliquesces into her airborne habitat. A mirror and a peephole become metaphors for looking in Schwontkowski’s work while Desgrandchamps uses a camera to inflect his grand essay on sight and consciousness. For Chu and McMurray the protagonist/looker obtains less distinction than the objects in their regard. Worth’s subjects both make contact with and obscure the person in their sight by means of their own shadow.
The paintings, sculpture and drawings in this exhibition remind us of the way experience has come to be described by neuroscientists as dreaming constrained by perception ; that the world we think we know is, in terms of the brain, made up. Representations highlight the constituting power of description by tangling thought and vision with matter and material objects. To reflect on looking with the aid of artworks is to arrest the flow of perception and to step back from its immersive surround. All of the works In a Violet Distance are emphatically handmade and bring an accumulating sense of touch into contact with vision. They draw objects seen in the distance within intimate reach with their human-scaled sociability. -David Humphrey
Group Show curated by David Humphrey
Media
Schedule
from October 29, 2010 to December 04, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-10-29 from 18:00 to 20:00