NYAB Event - "Free Variation" Exhibition

"Free Variation" Exhibition

Westbeth Gallery

This event has ended.

The idea of Free Variation comes from the philosopher, Edmund Husserl, for whom it was a method for finding the essence of things. He posited that by imagining a given thing appearing in different settings, variations will share qualitative traits that overlap. These overlapping areas contain both the common essence as well as what is indispensable to their individual being. No matter how much their materials, subject, or expressive modality differ, the free variations exhibit a structure of conjoint essences.

Three of the artists (Casey, Craig, and Mohassel) are philosophers as well as painters. The fourth, Maile is a landscape architect.

Their work is about the unfolding of experience – the natural, the abstract, the imagined and the real – and the meaningful intentional act of representation taken as active responses. In the spirit of allegresse that lights up images which hold thought at their origin, these artists are thinking through what the entire act of creation entails and signifies, tracing out even the most momentary variations of experiencing the world.

About the artists:
Christina Maile
My family coming from Borneo and Trinidad filled my childhood with stories about the woman with no face, heedless nature, and the dangers and joys which await the living and dead. Without them I would never have detected the hidden narrative structures which create and maintain everything we see, as if they were roots or veins. Painting for me is a physical thinking process to find the unexpected dialogue. This exhibit tells of the received images of mother and child, looks at lexicon of landscape, and finds solace in the damage/salvage of Sandy. Website: christinamaile.com

Parviz Mohassel

I am a painter, an architect and a philosopher. The painted lines and surfaces for me are findings, which are left behind in the process of painting as if they were at a distance, holding on. I am not painting for re-arrangement, re-orientation or composition. Rather I am activating conditions for variations to surface on a canvas. The invisible lurks behind every gestural brushstroke. If the invisible fades in the process, it persists, in variations taking shape on the canvas. Painting is an experience of activated horizonal possibilities, holding on to both the visible and invisible. Website: parvizmohassel.com

Ed Casey

Ed Casey’s works in this show constitute a set of free variations on landscape vistas. They include seascapes seen near Stonington, Maine, where he has painted in the company of Christina Maile and Parviz Mohassel and others during the past two decades. Reversing the usual course of late modern art, their evolution is from mainly abstract motifs to increasingly representational treatments. Casey’s preferred media are acrylic and watercolor, whose fast-drying water base requires rapid execution. He likes to think of his work as offering quick glances into the land and sea worlds: instantaneous takes on whatever catches his eye in those worlds. Website: edwardscasey.com

Megan Craig
Megan Craig’s work in this show relates to gravity and the variable weights of things. Some of the paintings deal with possible ways in which something withstands a pressure, rises, falls, floats, or buckles. Some have to do with ideas about digging or weeding – ways of moving through clutter and getting closer to the ground. Others depict ways of caring for abandoned things – cradling them, holding them up, and giving them a place to stand. Recently Craig has been thinking about painting as a way of learning how to perform seemingly mundane, elemental or automatic actions: how to breathe, how to grow, how to grip, how to eat, how to fall. Website: megancraig.com