“Spacematters” Exhibition
Brian Morris Gallery
This event has ended.
Brian Morris Gallery presents “spacematters,” a group show featuring paintings and sculpture by C. Michael Norton, Inna Babaeva, Stephen DiBenedetto, Clint Jukkala, Gary Petersen, Doreen McCarthy, and Mamie Holst.
Lines are drawn and redrawn. Borders are established, destroyed, re-established and oft times brutally enforced. They take on many forms to include the arbitrary lines on cartographers’ maps, natural boundaries dictated by landscape, stone walls and barred cells, or psychological barriers designed to protect us from our fears, real or imagined. The space between humanity, culture, and identity is infinite and rife with endless potential for order and chaos. As our world grows increasingly smaller yet more “global,” our understanding of and relationship to space continues to change.
This group of artists use various modes of expression to create and explore the nuances, possibilities and mysteries of the space we inhabit, how we choose to fill it, elevate it through our passion and craft to become more - to become art. Their aim is to foster relationships, between their works collectively, and you, the viewer.
C. Michael Norton slathers on paint with a squeegee to create multiple layers of vibrant color. He weaves these layers of paint like spider’s webs, revealing the empty beauty of the raw canvas, suggesting the mysteries of that which is unsaid, impossible to know.
Stephen DiBenedetto on the other hand buries the canvas beneath a dreamscape of reinvented archetypes that link our 21st century experience to the ancient world, suggesting the lack of separation between the two.
Gary Petersen cuts sharpened angles of color creating multiple planes, morphing a flattened surface into a vast landscape with depths unknown. As you are drawn deeper into these intersections, the vibrant color palettes interact and transform one another in open and gracious exchanges, while managing to maintain their own unique identities without ever actually touching.
Mamie Holst further explores the moment between. Her canvasses become the micro-cosmos. Like Béla Bartók’s own mikrokosmos, simple melodies become complex arrangements over time, sometimes gentle and sometimes turbulent, but never forceful. Sound and silence, object and emptiness, shape and void, light and dark are just some of the players in these acrylic dramas of inseparable duality.
Clint Jukkala’s paintings seem to have a consciousness all their own. They seem an invitation to the other side of the looking glass. The soft edges and oblong fields distort space and rise from somewhere beyond the border of the canvas. The result is fantastical paintings that reflect the infinite space within us.
Inna Babaeva, one of two sculptors in the show, uses plexiglass to suspend feathers mid-flight downward. Strewn about beneath the plexi are fallen feathers on the floor. The delicate feathers are sometimes ostensibly nailed to the ground below. The creature from which these feathers have come is nowhere to be seen. The stillness of the piece highlights gravity’s omnipresence and the weightlessness of the feathers become heavy in this frozen moment.
Doreen McCarthy uses plexiglass, inflatables, and simulacra in her work. In “spacematters,” shards of colored glass intersect to form crystalline objects. The imperfect edges and translucent hues suggest the ephemeral nature of all things. McCarthy’s swerving inflatable piece will be installed in the backyard, shifting the context to a larger scale in a public, yet private domain where object takes over space.
To paraphrase Mr. Rilke, ‘These works are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.’
Media
Schedule
from September 11, 2014 to October 11, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-09-11 from 19:00 to 21:00