"Mystics" Exhibition
BRIC
This event has ended.
BRIC Arts | Media | Bklyn presents Mystics: A Blessed Rage for Order, an exhibition at BRIC Rotunda Gallery that brings together the work of eight artists whose work is deeply process oriented and can be characterized by meticulous detail, repetition and often a ritualistic approach towards creating art works produced in a range of media. Curated by Elizabeth Ferrer.
The exhibition includes artists Chris Fennell, Matthew Franklin Wilson, Meg Hitchcock, Bernard Maisner, Rob de Oude, Jesse Pasca, Jen Stark, and Mario Trejo, who employ a variety of materials – from paper collage to gold leaf – to create pieces that can be awe-inspiring and wondrous in their painstaking detail. Rob de Oude has been commissioned to create a site-specific work for the exhibition, to be installed in two of the storefront windows of BRIC Rotunda Gallery. Comprised of layers of painted and taped Plexiglas, it will provide a large-scale, three-dimensional complement to his works on canvas. Entitled Time Lapse, the work will reveal an ever-changing interplay of line and space, light and color, for visitors and passersby.
Mysticism is broadly understood as a form of spiritual experience, a transcendent level of consciousness achieved by the most rigorously devout followers of a faith. This exhibition proposes a secular mode of mysticism rooted in artistic vision and practice that can be understood as direct expressions of the most essential aspects of self.
According to curator and BRIC Director of Contemporary Art, Elizabeth Ferrer, “The artists in this exhibition work in modes that might be seen as archaic, given the dominance of new technologies as well as conceptual frameworks in the visual arts. I feel that this fact endows even greater relevancy to this gathering of work – it suggests the value of work made slowly, by hand, in expressing fundamental issues of how we operate as humans.”
While the majority of artwork in Mystics is abstract, the work by these artists encompasses a wide range of concepts and meaning. Highlights from the exhibition include, Meg Hitchcock’s intricate collages made out of individual letters cut from books, often important religious texts, which literally intertwine spiritual traditions; calligrapher Bernard Maisner’s use of gold leaf, ink, and other materials to obsessively depict abstract elements in a 1460 painting of the Crucifixion; and Matthew Franklin Wilson’sdrawings made of repeated marks which signify waiting and the passing of time.
Media
Schedule
from March 21, 2012 to April 28, 2012
Mystics: The Artists Speak! will take place on Wednesday, April 4, from 7 to 9 pm.