Curated by Dan Cameron
January 17- February 7, 2014
Stephanie Kroth, Peggy Blount, Irene Garibay Sanchez, Leah McMacken, Shannon Chong, Paige Ramsa, Bianca Rylee, Adrian Harris, Hunter Slade, Zachary See, Corey Allen, Makary Malinouski, Natalie Lerner and Kyler Duhe.
GESTICULATIONS
by Dan Cameron
Although a gesticulation is typically understood to be a physical gesture that accompanies verbal speech, nearly any kind of nonverbal flourish will actually fit the bill. The Free Dictionary defines it as “a deliberate, vigorous motion or gesture,” which comes closer to explaining why it has been chosen on the present occasion for a title. Something peculiar about the concept of gesticulations is that they don’t quite rank, in and of themselves, as fragments of language, not even the nonverbal variety, but rather as a subterranean sub-language: they couldn’t possibly be mistaken for the main event.
And yet why not? We live in age of such brashly simplified overstatement that the notion of a gesture that never aspires to be more than a small part of a much larger thing has an appealing humility to it. An example might be Leah McMacken’s In the Woods, a photograph whose clear origins within a performance setting suggests its place within a sequential order of related images, whose absence speaks volumes. Corey Allen’s video LOSSY!!, made up of fragments of found video edited together as syncretic shapes and textures, blurs the distinction between personal memory and crowd-sourced anonymity.
Within the visual vocabulary of painting, gesticulation can signify a broad array of possible strategies for building a picture. The loosely brushed rectangles in Kyler Duhe’s painting Aileen resemble threatening weather fronts looming over the continental North America. Peggy Blount’s small green painting Desire uses the visual language of surrealism and fantasy to conjure a version of the uncanny, in which the distinction between vegetation, animal and human life become disturbingly blurred. Stephanie Kroth’s A Place I’ll Go is large colorful street scene rendered in semi-outline using broad swaths of paint, while her Moss is a small dark abstraction that seems to be folding in on itself. Makary Malinouski’s still life paintings, Roller, Lighter and Pear and Shoe incorporate the visual vocabulary of contemporary consumer objects, but the graphic white outline separating each object from its background underscores the artificiality of the entire construct.
Not all pictorial artworks consist of a flat canvas with dried pigment. Paige Ramsay’s Bees Sting is a hand-embroidered textile work, in which the figurative content nearly merges with the background of budding blossoms. Using tar as a binding element, Hunter Slade layers his with a gestural spontaneity that recalls the rubbled surfaces of 1950s Abstract Expressionism, but sprinkled with a peculiarly 21st century angst. Adrian Harris’ The Black Horse functions both as a large drawing on unstretched canvas, as well as a frame-like sculptural object within which the same canvas has been suspended from the corners using twine.
In the sculptural realm, any gesticulating impulse becomes automatically slowed down, suspended in the framework of three-dimensional space. This is even true in the case of a wall installation such as Shannon Chong’s Finding and Losing Ourselves, in which a few dozen tiny wooden boats appear to transport curry from the right side of the wall – the ‘Orient’ – to the ‘West Indies’ segment of the wall on the left. Similarly, Natalie Lerner’s work starts from the point of view of a painter, but the three-dimensional form of a dancing stool, like that of the painted ‘pool’ lying on the floor, literally extends her spatial possibilities into the viewer’s immediate proximity.
Irene Garibay Sanchez’s Deeper than Guts is a handmade book, each page of which has been saturated with watercolor, and assigned plate numbers, as if cataloging specimens from a natural history collection. Zachary See’s mischievously titled She’s the One, a relief diptych in which two arrows protrude from what appear to be female breasts, manages a difficult juggling act between two contradictory meanings: a witty rendition of Cupid’s arrow targeting a pair of hapless lovers, and the more problematic depiction of the male of the species’ unchecked urge to slay the object of its desire.
by Dan Cameron
Although a gesticulation is typically understood to be a physical gesture that accompanies verbal speech, nearly any kind of nonverbal flourish will actually fit the bill. The Free Dictionary defines it as “a deliberate, vigorous motion or gesture,” which comes closer to explaining why it has been chosen on the present occasion for a title. Something peculiar about the concept of gesticulations is that they don’t quite rank, in and of themselves, as fragments of language, not even the nonverbal variety, but rather as a subterranean sub-language: they couldn’t possibly be mistaken for the main event.
And yet why not? We live in age of such brashly simplified overstatement that the notion of a gesture that never aspires to be more than a small part of a much larger thing has an appealing humility to it. An example might be Leah McMacken’s In the Woods, a photograph whose clear origins within a performance setting suggests its place within a sequential order of related images, whose absence speaks volumes. Corey Allen’s video LOSSY!!, made up of fragments of found video edited together as syncretic shapes and textures, blurs the distinction between personal memory and crowd-sourced anonymity.
Within the visual vocabulary of painting, gesticulation can signify a broad array of possible strategies for building a picture. The loosely brushed rectangles in Kyler Duhe’s painting Aileen resemble threatening weather fronts looming over the continental North America. Peggy Blount’s small green painting Desire uses the visual language of surrealism and fantasy to conjure a version of the uncanny, in which the distinction between vegetation, animal and human life become disturbingly blurred. Stephanie Kroth’s A Place I’ll Go is large colorful street scene rendered in semi-outline using broad swaths of paint, while her Moss is a small dark abstraction that seems to be folding in on itself. Makary Malinouski’s still life paintings, Roller, Lighter and Pear and Shoe incorporate the visual vocabulary of contemporary consumer objects, but the graphic white outline separating each object from its background underscores the artificiality of the entire construct.
Not all pictorial artworks consist of a flat canvas with dried pigment. Paige Ramsay’s Bees Sting is a hand-embroidered textile work, in which the figurative content nearly merges with the background of budding blossoms. Using tar as a binding element, Hunter Slade layers his with a gestural spontaneity that recalls the rubbled surfaces of 1950s Abstract Expressionism, but sprinkled with a peculiarly 21st century angst. Adrian Harris’ The Black Horse functions both as a large drawing on unstretched canvas, as well as a frame-like sculptural object within which the same canvas has been suspended from the corners using twine.
In the sculptural realm, any gesticulating impulse becomes automatically slowed down, suspended in the framework of three-dimensional space. This is even true in the case of a wall installation such as Shannon Chong’s Finding and Losing Ourselves, in which a few dozen tiny wooden boats appear to transport curry from the right side of the wall – the ‘Orient’ – to the ‘West Indies’ segment of the wall on the left. Similarly, Natalie Lerner’s work starts from the point of view of a painter, but the three-dimensional form of a dancing stool, like that of the painted ‘pool’ lying on the floor, literally extends her spatial possibilities into the viewer’s immediate proximity.
Irene Garibay Sanchez’s Deeper than Guts is a handmade book, each page of which has been saturated with watercolor, and assigned plate numbers, as if cataloging specimens from a natural history collection. Zachary See’s mischievously titled She’s the One, a relief diptych in which two arrows protrude from what appear to be female breasts, manages a difficult juggling act between two contradictory meanings: a witty rendition of Cupid’s arrow targeting a pair of hapless lovers, and the more problematic depiction of the male of the species’ unchecked urge to slay the object of its desire.
Leah McMacken, In the Woods
Kyler Duhe, Aileen
Makary Malinouski, Roller, Lighter and Pear
Zachary See, She's the One
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