NYAB Event - Gary Horn “Night Journey: Paralytic Moments of Projected Memory”

Gary Horn “Night Journey: Paralytic Moments of Projected Memory”

Gallery Juno

This event has ended.

Gallery Juno presents a solo exhibition of paintings by artist Gary Horn. Night Journey: Paralytic Moments of Projected Memory is a series of works, which, on one level at least, address the reasons for, and effects of, human conflict. They are not merely personal artistic visions that probe the depth of individual consciousness, but are a call for an investigation of the greater social consciousness and the modern condition of the terror inherent in the culture of war, of blind faith in political ideology, of lost freedoms, and perhaps of a failed utopia.
Horn’s paintings are dizzying spectacles of symbolic elements that amount to profound visual declarations, realizations, visions, dreams and truths that act within an interchange of personal and social realism which engages the viewer in the greater discourse of our role as participants in a society where participation often seems futile and the continued abuse of powers thrive on the blind nationalism of a populace weaned on violence and thus, continual and ever greater suffering.

Night Journey mines not only a contemporary visual language, but is layered with historical artistic references as well, which further serve to enrich the artist’s complex ideology. Picasso’s Guernica, Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Amazing Juggler, elements of Dürer, Michelangelo, Ray Johnson and more. These claustrophobic compositions of interwoven elements; figures (sometimes transparent and ghostly, yet always weighted with purpose), uncanny spaces… fractured scenes, surreal moments in time exposed not in photographic singularity, but in dreamscapes of shifting histories where clarity of visual narrative is elusive, yet also seemingly stable. Like dreams, there is a contrast of instances that one can feel acutely, yet always seem to be just out of reach. Like nightmares, they are paralyzed scenarios of the effects of living in a culture of fear, hatred, and greed: of a humanity that is imprisoned by inequality, complacency, denial, and powerlessness, fumbling for answers in the dark.

It has been said that in the realm of dreams alone humanity is allowed freedom. These poignant works are records of troubled sleep. Yet perhaps within them there can also be found the path toward a universal awareness, the longing for a distant assurance not yetout of reach… the journey towards a light of hope to be realized upon awakening.