45 + Anniversary Exhibition Series: Part II

On the auspicious occasion marking over forty-five years as a contemporary art venue in Colorado, Robischon Gallery is pleased to present “45 +,” PART II of the gallery’s anniversary exhibition series which began with PART I in November of 2022. The distinctive tandem presentations offer a unique glimpse into the broader spectrum of numerous noteworthy Robischon Gallery exhibitions. While touching upon a specific selection of the gallery’s far-reaching dialogues within art, the series features new and memorable archived artworks by several represented and previously exhibited artists in celebration of all of the exemplary artists the gallery has presented over its many decades-long presence in Colorado. PART I highlighted twenty-nine artists in a blend of tangential or thematic modes of cross-cultural/political histories, symbiotic human relationships with Nature in form or narrative, as well as an exaltation of Nature’s beauty and issues of environmentalism. In PART II, varied modes in overt abstraction are on view by thirty local, regional, national, and internationally recognized artists who offer sculpture, painting, print, and photo-based works on paper in a wide range of approach with a strong sense of materiality and process.

Since its inception in 1976, Robischon Gallery has been producing museum-level contemporary art exhibitions for its audiences in Colorado and beyond. Embracing the ongoing pluralism in art, the exhibitions and artists represented and regularly exhibited purposefully address a continuum of stylistic and contextual concerns, allowing for a diverse range of voices. Robischon Gallery’s expansive exhibition program maintains a commitment to burgeoning and mid-career artists of integrity and vision, while continuously broadening its list of historically significant artists shown to include Robert Motherwell, Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Joan Mitchell, Richard Serra, and Christo, among many others. Robischon Gallery’s represented and exhibited artists of influence such as Judy Pfaff, Kiki Smith, Ann Hamilton, Enrique Martínez Celaya, John Buck, and Bernar Venet reaffirm the gallery’s vision to foster thought-provoking and meaningful progressions in contemporary art in a variety of art-making practices. The gallery has long been recognized for premiering important artists and exhibiting challenging forms of creative expression, as it continues to set bold new standards for contemporary art in the Mountain states region.

At this celebratory time, Robischon Gallery, in gratitude, wishes to offer its heartfelt acknowledgement of all of its artists’ remarkable inventiveness, dedication in the studio and loyalty to the gallery. Without the artists leading the way, there would be no story to tell, no inspiration, and assuredly, no gallery over all these years. In concert, the gallery also wishes to sincerely recognize the importance of those individuals who have chosen to generously support the artists and the gallery – whether it be private collectors, museum directors and curators, art advisors, art consultants, architects, designers and the gallery’s many colleagues in Denver, across the country and overseas, as well as each responsive exhibition visitor. Robischon Gallery owes its long presence in Denver to this exceptional patronage. It is also important to note those very special art writers who have made it their mission to enhance the local art community’s experience of art. Though the gallery has enjoyed coverage elsewhere, it counts itself as extremely fortunate to have been gifted, for the artists’ sake, a great deal of dedicated coverage in Denver since its earliest days – including the writing of Mary Voelz Chandler whose loss reminds all anew of how fully engaged written commentary is crucial to the vitality of any collective art culture. And finally, but no less important and critical to the gallery’s success, is its hard working, talented staff. To mount complex exhibitions at this scale, keeping each of the artworks safe, while being accessible to those who cross the gallery’s threshold, virtually or in person, requires considerable knowledge, skill, patience, and a receptive attitude.

The artists on view and all acknowledged above ignite the true spirit of Robischon Gallery.  At its core, this multi-decade, two-part anniversary series celebration is a shared endeavor in devoted service of the importance and power of ART.

 

GARY KOMARIN

“All of my paintings proceed without preconception. I paint to find out what it is that I am going to paint. I think of myself as a stagehand who sets up the conditions necessary for drama to unfold. The very best paintings are most often those that fail the most. Once a painting has achieved a life of its own, when it speaks back to you as a painter, this is a good place to be. Since 1992, my ongoing ‘Cake’ series has merged the architectural and the domestic – rooted in the memories of my father, an architect and my mother who was a self-taught baker. I would create the cake paintings in one synchronistic sweep, not stopping until I reached bottom of the piece. Then I would hang the painting on the wall and have a look. The cake might drip, and often would in surprising ways, uncontrolled by me as the painting was done on the floor and the brush was now put aside. It occurred to me that the drips related both to painting and cake-making. I generally like the way that they seem to take care of themselves. They nearly always drip in the right place.”

 

JUDY PFAFF

“The work initially came out of problem solving. I struggled with how to make an object. It’s much easier for me to paint the wall or drag something into the space. I find it very difficult to make just one thing, because as soon as I do, I think it would be better with another thing. I was put off by how limited the language of sculpture was, and how it was owned not just by abstraction and conceptual art, but it seemed limited by ‘truth to materials,’ and should be singular, monochromatic, opaque, and non-narrative. I'm involved in making as compact visual structures as I can handle; weaving many different languages in and out; two-dimensional, three-dimensional, architectural, metaphorical, allegorical, literal and abstract. I want a density in the work to have things going on in layers. I used to think that most art is kind of stingy. There is a demand in much of art to read the text panel to understand what you are experiencing. Generosity and openness are important to me, so that the viewer is not intimidated, threatened, or belittled. There’s no coming to school and feeling like you didn’t get the homework done. You can enjoy it, even if you don’t know everything about it.” 

 

KATY STONE

“My installations are like Rorschach tests of natural phenomena. I paint on a variety of materials (such as aluminum or Duralar) and often layer the elements into sculptural assemblages or installations that blur the boundaries between drawing, painting, and sculpture and act as both kaleidoscope and microscope. I explore phenomena and beauty and use industrial materials that are light; that call attention to themselves as surfaces. Everything I choose is a thin thing. I paint, cut, and layer these surfaces into constructions brimming with dualities, my pieces capture a sense of monumentality and at the same time a feeling of transience.”  

 

DEBORAH ZLOTSKY

“For me, a painting makes concrete the intersection between visual language and lived experience. Studying art history was my entrance into artmaking, and a continuing love of art from the past informs the language of my new work: elements from the mash-up of abstraction and illusion in early Renaissance frescoes; the radical shapeshifting of Surrealism; and the countercultural color and groove of 1960s psychedelia and Pop Art. History and the passage of time are conveyed in the way I handle materials as well. On a broader level, I'm fascinated by the way history evolves through the accumulation of actions and reactions—in the way complexities are built over time through the coincidences and unrelated events that get baked in. When I paint, drips, smears, and abrasions remain in the work, uncorrected and vital. These imperfections trace the history of the making, and, as a metaphor, the accidents and complexities of living. As I age and experience the daily mismatch between my body and my consciousness, I’m drawn to incongruities, to creating paintings and drawings that seem old and new, flat and fleshy, geometric and figurative, bold and soft, constructed and alive.” 

 

ANN HAMILTON

              "My first hand is a sewing hand. A line of thread drawn up and down through cloth influences how I think about the confluence and rhythms of space and time. The edition of ciliary began with the extension of a single line. Drawn, sewn or written, a line contains all the attention present in its moment of making, the rhythms of breath and body, the weather of hesitations and the stutter of the hand orbiting in the body’s immediate periphery.  Folded, cut, or accreted, the line’s incessant horizontality returns to itself and takes a circular form. It is simple work; it requires the body to be slow. For me, the circle of the hand making is the first eye. It is the empty center in the tower, the clearing in the forest, where with the fundaments of cloth and paper and line we weave and re-weave unending relations."  

 

ANA MARIA HERNANDO

“During my childhood in Buenos Aires, I spent summers in my family’s textile workshop on the sewing assembly line and I also watched the Spanish women of my family come together to sew, crochet, and embroider; sharing the everyday with one another. These spontaneous circles of women gathering with a common purpose always held something magical for me – a power that was difficult to define but impossible to ignore. The community they built has no use for the ego of an individual, making way for the well-being of the whole as the focus. The things my mother and grandmothers made from fabric and thread were expressions of the communal spirit. I explore these unacknowledged feminine forces of work as a prayer, searching for the divinity in the collective work. This invisibility is not a coincidence, but an imposed silencing, stemming from the discomfort that patriarchal societies have had with the work of women for centuries. In my installations and sculptural works, I include the handwork of other women who reach back to traditions that survive through time: embroidered petals made by cloistered Carmelite nuns, clouds of tulle made by friends and volunteers at my studio, starched Peruvian petticoats from mountainous Quechua communities, and other artifacts of toil, exuberance, and creation. Using these seemingly soft daily materials, I want to reclaim the idea of what power looks like; to show that it is present in the unfolding of the feminine, unstoppable, and unconstrained.”

 

JAE KO

“My work is not about making a specific conceptual statement: rather, it’s about the transformative power of art. To me caring for the environment is essential. But I think of myself less as an environmental activist and more as someone who is inspired by the natural environment and can reinterpret landscapes, allowing visitors to experience a particular environment in a different way. I don’t want to use something you can get in an art supply store. I experimented with adding machine tape and I would try and try until I could get a conversation going with the material. I would talk with the paper, and it would talk back to me. It’s kind of accidental, but you have to make the accident. The material can be anything, but you have to work with it, you have to play with it, you have to engage with it so the material can tell you how to do it, and what to do. That is the way of working with paper, an ordinary material that can be more than what you see because paper transforms like silk reminiscent of the ancient, twisted bristlecone pines of the West that inspired this series of coiled sculptures.”

 

TRINE BUMILLER

“My paintings reference the natural world. Images are abstracted and recombined to convey the patterns, rhythms, and underlying forces inherent in our immediate environment. They merge an idea of place with a sense of memory and existence and address loss of nature relative to losses of memory, people, and place. In alterations of colors or forms, and perspectives, the paintings evoke an alternative universe in which connections are made between memories and experience, between time and place, and between imagined space and physical existence.”

 

ELLSWORTH KELLY

“Everywhere I look, everything became something to be made, and it had to be exactly as it was with nothing added. It was a new freedom: there was no longer a need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything. It all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory with its broken and patched panels, lines on a roadmap… paper fragments in the street. It was all the same: anything goes. Making art has, first of all, to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all 'meaning' of the thing seen. Then only, can the real meaning of it be understood and felt. I'm interested in the mass and color, the black and the white, the edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be.”  The “States of the River” series are water current abstractions of eight of the worlds famous rivers, The Rhine, The Nile, The Thames, The Amazon, The Mississippi, The Hudson, The Seine and The Yangtze furthered the artist’s interest in waterways and the natural world.

 

MARCELYN MCNEIL

         “My experimental approach to making merges improvisation, intuition and control through both intimate and large-scale oil abstractions that evolve primarily through pouring methods with superimposed blocks of pure color. Adopting a lyrical call-and-response attitude toward process, I use multiple layers, stains, and bleeds of thinned pigment that fade into one another—suggesting a space that is both formed and unformed. The quietly subversive approach experiments with illusion, perspective, and color to create a place for unmediated introspection. I think a life of varied experience is evident in my work. The paintings, while materially invested, can suggest sculptural ideas about mass and the work has been described as both 'lyrical and muscular' which is reflective of my personal history and how I make sense of and move through the world."

 

DON VOISINE

“My work isn’t geometric because I wanted to make geometric paintings. It’s where the work led me. It’s all painting whether it’s representational or abstract. A good painting is a good painting.

 I think of [the dark areas] as an absence, but it’s also full. It has weight, a presence. It can be read both ways, a void, or something weightier. I like to get different readings. The white ground can be read as a negative or a positive, and it can vary from painting to painting, but generally I try to have things operate on a number of levels. My use of color is very subjective, very intuitive. It’s what sets the tone. The colors affect the interior blacks, but I don’t try to put in specific associations. I’m open to how people respond to the work and what they’ll see in it. I’m not trying to make something look like a landscape or something literal or literary. That’s one of the reasons I was drawn to working abstractly in the first place. I can express the essence of something without a narrative to it.”

 

DAVID FOUGHT

“These sculptures offer an engagement with the physical world finding objecthood in the way color often locates emotion. Metal coat hangers are burned red-hot, cooled and hammered into straight rods, then re-bent into various flat shapes. When two flat shapes, say a triangle or a square, are intersected, three-dimensional negative spaces are created, I then use plaster to fill some of the negative spaces to emphasize mass. For me, the tarnished, blackened and patinaed metal rods and flawed, blemished plaster with random oxidation stains evokes imperfection, aging and impermanence, inviting the subtle clues of objecthood in these works to come forward.”

 

RICHARD SERRA

“Existentialism, probably more than anything, influenced how I approach materials and process. It got me to the point where I thought matter imposed its own form and you have to deal with the immediacy of matter in relation to process. Obsession is what it comes down to. It is difficult to think without obsession, and it is impossible to create something without a foundation that is rigorous, incontrovertible, and, in fact, to some degree repetitive. Repetition is the ritual of obsession; a way to jumpstart the indecision of beginning. To persevere and to begin over and over again is to continue the obsession with work. Work comes out of work. In order to work you must already be working. With art, if you’re open to seeing it, then you probably have a sensation, which then leads to an experience. And that experience is probably private, and deals with your background, where you were born, what you’ve been exposed to in life, who you know, what your education was; and it will lead to other ways of thinking about other things… Blackness is a property, not a quality. I made it black to divorce it from being a quality.”

 

DEBORAH DANCY

“In the paintings and works on paper, I discover meaning through the illuminated and obfuscated forms in an intermediary region full of potential and trepidation. These elements teeter between hope and potential despair. Incomplete and fragmented shapes hover, float and collide with one another in an ambiguous space where I construct imagined forms from my examination of the disjointed properties that exist between natural and architectural structures. I put paint on and scrape it off, back and forth until I find that something that holds my interest, and then I expand upon it until it begins to announce itself with some authority. I build on these oddly similar properties by merging disconcerting hues, abutments, or abrupt juxtapositions to fabricate work where reason is suspended, and beauty is suspect. These spaces are both beautiful and unnerving. In this realm of the incomplete, the fragment, and residue of ‘almost was and might become,’ I see a faint light.”

 

WENDI HARFORD

“I have gained a new appreciation for the making of the drip paintings. The nature of the material itself, making its way without any intervention. The repetitive, almost ritualistic process has become more of a meditative experience. I am fortunate to be able to experience that.”

 

ALISON HALL

“My source, the fundamental well, is Giotto’s Arena Chapel. Inside of this space his frescoes chronicle the life of the Virgin. The ceiling is covered in stars, a simple repeating pattern on a veil of blue that is transcendental. And the pavement (black and white), the place where you stand to look towards the heavens is covered in a pattern of interlocking diamonds. All of the patterns in my paintings derive from these two opposing spaces. The spaces have always been so separate in my mind, the above, a place of pure love (the pattern taken from the cloak of the Madonna) and the below, a place of earth-bound love (the black paintings). I’m beginning to feel the two spaces merge—that what is myth, so far away in the heavens, in the stars can manifest here, right in your presence.” 

 

ROBERT MOTHERWELL

“Art isn't something out there… It is not a ‘picture’ of an artistic experience. It has to become ‘experience’ itself. And in that sense, it can only be earned by one's own body rhythms, one's own color sense, one's own sense of smell, of light, of texture being so automatically articulated there is no possibility not to make a work of art, in the sense that it is impossible to think of any other choice. I would think one of the functions of modern art is to break through conventions to what is the ultimate truth of a given person’s beingness. It is what every artist, musician, poet is constantly analyzing in himself and in his work. And what's marvelous about having one of those languages is you can look at the language, and in that sense get outside of yourself.”

 

BERNAR VENET

“Artists who have made art evolve have often tackled disciplines that did not serve as models to previous form of art. Religion was a main subject in art, then the representation of the body, then nature, geometry, and so on. Things evolve through topics that we explore… As for me, I was able, thanks to mathematics, to introduce into my art a system of signs that had nothing to do with the figurative tradition or even the abstract tradition of the 1910s. But I do not think I understand mathematics. I use this field to evolve in my art, in the same way as Cezanne painted trees, plants and flowers but was not an expert in botany. In the same way as Malevich who painted circles and squares in his paintings but was not a geometrician. Everything happens intuitively, it is not the perfectly rational result of a thought. We evolve in an empirical way and, all of a sudden, we discover spaces that have never been thought out, and we rush in.”

 

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

“Drawing opens our eyes. and the eyes lead to our soul. What comes out is not at all what one has planned. The only remedy against disorder is work. And work puts an order in disorder and control over chaos. I do, I undo, I redo. I am what I am doing. Art exhausts me. Yet I work every day of my life to work out all that bothers me. All my complaints. This way there’s always a component of anger in beauty. My drawings are about the passing of time. The repetition gives a physical quality to the mark‑making. I want to bring my whole body into the process of drawing. The lines are like knitting. They are like a heartbeat. They have the rhythm of the unconscious.”

 

LINDA FLEMING

“My works hint at the co-existence of the mundane and the cosmological where two realities simultaneously exist – including the possibility that the past is also present. The structures are diagrams of thought that provide a glimpse of the strangeness beyond the everyday world; opening a place where thought becomes tangible, history leaves a trace, and information exhales form. Physical sensation and perception are interdependent, and I sometimes wonder if what I am seeing is an indication of something outside of what I know or a sudden awareness of the blood vessels coursing through my eyes. Material can never fully communicate thought, which makes these elaborate constructions more poignant in their attempt than they would ever be in their articulateness.”

 

OMAR CHACÓN

“My research and interest in the structure of painting throughout time enables me to break down the components of the act, allowing for a physical separation of the material from the canvas. I pour paint, letting it dry into units that become the building blocks or brushstrokes that then migrate onto the canvas. I liken my works to a social gathering, a global nation comprised of a diverse blend of culturally different peoples, living amongst each other with a sense of unity, yet maintaining individuality; each unit, each drip is unique. Though greatly absorbed with art-historical reference, at its core my work deals with subjects that shine from my heart; baroque in thought, fruitful in being and orgiastic in beauty. Every painting is its own theory or universe; it is a world onto itself. It is an infinitely radical galaxy according to its own rules. In some metaphysical but organic way, you are seeing the group mind and I cherish this solidarity with my colleagues and especially with the history of painting. Being responsive to change is not only an inherently creative act in the studio but with both invention and integrity as the goal, art and life holds the most promise, the most reward!”

 

AMY ELLINGSON

“My work exaggerates the dichotomy between the lightning-fast process of digital rendering and the painstaking method of execution through traditional oil and encaustic painting techniques. I love the connection to the past. Artists have been using these materials for hundreds of years and have an intrinsic relationship to them All of my imagery, whether geometrically intact or abstracted and chaotic, comprises a vocabulary of very simple forms that are digitally manipulated. The paintings consist of many interrelated layers of repeating geometric forms—straight lines and arcs, primarily—that I compose on the computer. I replicate these basic elements into an increasingly complex field that I then render in discreet layers of oil and encaustic paint. Using ephemeral, computer-generated images exclusively as my source material, I create paintings that physically assert themselves through the materiality and permanence of historical painting media. The translation from the ‘virtual’ to the ‘real’ is paramount and my interests lie in the practices of formal repetition, variation and mutation within limited serial networks. The works are created through a series of steps intended to conflate the systemic and the gestural. Working within a self- reflexive system—borrowing, distorting, manipulating, copying and pasting, re-contextualizing—I create a personal language that is hermetic, yet flexible and mutable. Digital tools enable me to develop a vocabulary of forms that are used, grabbed, reused, and manipulated beyond recognition, resulting in a signature vernacular of marks that are predetermined via digital processing. My goal is to create works that address the intersection of abstract painting and contemporary virtual experience.”

 

 TED LARSEN

“We live a world of influence, where place matters and where everything is highly programmed. We live in a world where standards are not relevant, where what matters is celebrity status. We live a world where science doesn’t matter. Where science is fiction, fiction is truth and truth exists only as long as it is convenient. We live in a world of questionable relevance where what doesn’t matter does and what does matter doesn’t. Lucky for us, art doesn’t pay attention to these rules or conditions. It operates outside of limits, standards, and territories. It doesn’t care about what we care about. It serves but is only of service when it is convenient for itself. Art does this because it transcends the moment, the people, the culture, the hierarchy. Art is a lens, a condenser, a spreader, a pry bar. It opens. It shines. It illuminates. It doesn’t need us. We need it. And that is the rub. We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are. Art shows us who we are.” 

 

JONATHAN PARKER

“I make my work, one piece at a time, trying to have no expectations — just an open heart for what is to come. I repeat or elaborate using a loose, invented visual vocabulary of forms, trusting my subconscious to guide these repetitions and elaborations so that the forms evolve into variations. These variations develop into their own distinctive sub-series within this larger, ongoing body of ‘sewn paintings.’ I work by intuition using a sensibility I’ve developed over time to guide me, rather than my critical mind. In this way, I’ve eliminated some of the internal thinking, which for me can get in the way. And if the painting works, it speaks not in my voice but in a universal language. These small pieces rely on the material to make them shine - often the beat up or marked canvas and the raw or rough feeling they produce. That is not to discount my shapes, which can be rather minimal or a little more complicated, depending on where the work takes me through elements of drawing, painting, and more provisional approaches like mending and appliqué.”

 

DERRICK VELASQUEZ

“I aim to question the way we physically interact with the tangible and manufactured structures of everyday life as I have always dealt with physical and metaphorical ideas of structure - how one object or entity is or is not held together by another. The body is a great example of a physical structure that amazes me. I think of the way the vinyl stacks as something like shoulders. There’s bone that serves as armature, then you have muscle, tendon and skin layered on top of it. The more you add to it, the softer those curves become. The vinyl is a specific material that you’re supposed to sit on, but the accumulation of strips exposing the vinyl’s innards allows me to make a new form on the wall denying its original purpose as upholstery material. Through an investigative manipulation that observes and skews nominal measurements, my work teases out our psychological relation to the dimensions and conditions given by such unexpected materials.”

 

KATE PETLEY

“Transformation lies at the heart of my work, for both the materials and the content. Common materials like cardboard are used in a process that collapses the boundaries between sculpture, photography, and painting. My attention is focused on creating images that affect the deepest levels of vision and I am less concerned with the fact that my approach uses both pigment-based and light-based methods. This lofty and perhaps improbable goal to unite these seemingly disparate approaches animates my decisions and keeps me digging away at the possibilities year after year. Upon rising each morning, I tell myself that I have ‘this one bright day,’ in acknowledgment that my influence applies only to the present moment. The vulnerability of the human condition is implied. This proclamation began in the pandemic and continues as a greeting. Importantly, it contains a built-in recognition of light itself as a tangible thing.”

 

JAQ CHARTIER

“Science keeps me inspired by the wondrous. And like a scientist, I call my paintings ‘tests’ because they’re actual explorations of the phenomena of materials. I chart the intimate interactions between my materials and make notes directly on the paintings to help me track what’s happening. I like to set up tension between a minimal, stripped-down aesthetic and effusive lush color — a type of color that suggests something outside of our ordinary, everyday world. Beautiful, but also sort of bizarre – inflamed, suggestive of energies that we can’t see – from my own custom formulas of deeply saturated inks, stains and dyes. Such colors can do things paint can’t do – bleed, shift, and migrate through other layers of paint, or change color, or even completely disappear. Even after years of study, I’m still intrigued by their hidden chemistries.” 

 

BARBARA TAKENAGA

“I’m interested in that shared place where one can hold two seemingly opposing views at the same time, a kind of standing in the middle, that space between naming something and having it be non-verbal. Clearly, it’s a very old idea that comes up in many philosophies and religions. I like that idea of possibility. Process-wise, I have been trying to loosen up. First, I make the backgrounds — splashy, faux-Abstract Expressionist grounds with very freely manipulated paint, applied without much preconception. After that, I play ‘Zen Surrealist,’ studying the accidental incidents and finding subject matter embedded in the painting. I just sit and look at them and wait for them to tell me what to do, and then go with that. They still seem to naturally gravitate, or maybe anti-gravitate, to some kind of explosive/implosive situation. I still love the idea itself of the Big Bang. I’m interested in the shared place where one can hold two seemingly opposing views at the same time in a space between naming something and having it be non-verbal. I like the idea of unspoken possibility that becomes a kind of visual tolerance. At the same time, there is a willfulness in the works themselves. I love that the paint asserts itself through gravity, density and motion, and often tells me what to do in a collaboration where I am urged to relinquish my tendency to control. The familiar is upended by change and circumstance seemingly in a personal parallel with our current times.”

 

TERRY MAKER

“Each piece in my various bodies of work emerges from humble origins, taking shape from an eccentric collection of ordinary materials that initially offer no hint of what they might become when made to live together. The final dense, tactile assemblages present themselves with minimal clues to their complex origins. The building materials are highly considered, formally and conceptually. Yet as they come into being, my position in relation to these materials is the sometimes uncomfortable one of sustained suspense. Discovering their ultimate destiny requires curiosity-driven play – which, with such materials, is a visceral, physically demanding, and mysterious process. The ‘Field Lines’ series is inspired by the electromagnetic lines depicted in scientific and mathematical literature. I am intrigued by the push and pull of energy and its sensory attraction-and-repulsion aesthetic in all the forms in which it appears in the organic and social world – everything from particle physics to personal and cultural dynamics. Constructed of shredded and compacted scientific documents that were subsequently embedded with resin elements to depict vector fields, I primarily use circle element. Visually, the circle is both a conceptual building block and a formalist end in itself. A circle is a sustained tension, a chord eternally straining away from its center point, and eternally drawn back from the margins to that center. The complex world of circles thus enfolds and suspends dualities, holding opposites in necessary traction. It is also an entry point, the outer rim of an inner space; whether as a sphere or a portal, it is the borderland to a world.”

 

GARY EMRICH

“I've always made pictures of other pictures taking objects, materials, and pictures out of context and putting them into my own narrative. It has been the one constant in my work for forty years. My photographic series, entitled ‘HERALDRY,’ continues my interest in plastic consumer product packaging. I use plastic shopping bags, water bottle case wrappers, vegetable bags and other consumer packaging, combining them to create coats of arms for contemporary times. To make these ideas real, I layer hard, transparent plastic ‘blister packs’ on top of these arrangements on a light table, fill the plastic depressions with bottled water and photograph the compositions with a view camera. I have chosen to combine two of the first things we throw away, inverting the value of the materials consumers buy by preserving and elevating the disposable and ubiquitous packaging and plastics to make trash into an object of desire and beauty. This is the constant in my work.”