Patricia Dillon and Josef Zutelgte “Discord and Harmony”
Westbeth Gallery
This event has ended.
Westbeth Gallery announces the opening of Patricia Dillon and Josef Zutelgte’s Discord and Harmony. The exhibition marks the first collaboration of the two artists and presents an expansive body of sculptures, graphite and pencil drawings, collages, and c-print photographs.
Both artists explore the possibilities of the invisible within us. The apparent contradiction of making the invisible visible is just one aspect of the exhibition’s investigation of double-identities, transformative physicalities, connectedness and disconnection, and other dualities that can result in simultaneous discord and harmony. Dillon and Zutelgte give expression to these often intangible aspects of communication, identity, and human relationships.
Sea “creatures,” crystal children, and Latin American identities are among the images Patricia Dillon creates to confront us with ambiguity and fantasy, as well as her interest in documenting the gritty and beautiful. Acting as both observer and manipulator, Dillon discovers mask-like images in a mermaid parade in “The Aliens from the Sea” and transforms portraits into hybrid beings in “Crystal Children.” Here, questions about double identity and gender issues surface: The images are direct and unavoidable; the masks, however, allow the viewer to explore the mutability of identity—the subject’s and his own—offering the freedom, at least for a moment, to “swim free.”
Of this work, Dillon states that her primary interest “lies in double identity. The images are fantasies, but they are documents of our time in a weird way. They are also escapist and entertaining in their own right. I think the best sort of documents have a dual purpose.”
Human interaction—emotional and physical—is the focus of Josef Zutelgte’s work. He explores facial expression, replacing realistic imagery with lines and shapes, and a new language of signs emerges in the form of positive and negative shapes. The symbols recall hieroglyphs or even city maps but allow for a more ambiguous interpretation. “Snowflakes in August” is a sculpture with a curved surface created by an interwoven, double-layered net structure. The net seems to expand and looks bigger than the sculpture itself, as if it is a piece that has broken off from a larger context and happened to land at your feet. The net, or screen, also creates the sense of a private and a public space, allowing the viewer to wander into both sides, then all of a sudden end up somewhere else—in a place where you might be able to look back to where you were before. Within the visual complexity of the net, a mesh of invisible connections and relationships is formed.
Zutelgte’s exploration of different yet shared systems is also evident in his work on paper, where he translates the dimensionality of space into his drawings, transforming them into two-dimensional sculptures.
Media
Schedule
from October 11, 2014 to October 26, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-10-11 from 18:00 to 21:00