My art writings...
Living with Matthew Offenbacher's Hume's Tomb / A Sharper Image
March 2019
Here in the northwest, the weather is rarely bad in a dramatic sense. The in-your-face brutality of the Midwest in winter, with its similarly dramatic lows and highs of human compassion and connection, is a far cry from our usual mild winter. For us, it’s much more of a frog-in-a-pot situation. The winter isn’t that bad until you find yourself in February, all the sudden much more depressed than you thought you were, but without the resiliency that comes with the constant vigilance against the extreme elemental forces and with no countermeasures for the inevitable arrival of a dangerous point in the cycle.
It’s not all bad though, this turn inward means winter is the season of the mind, of contemplation and meditation, of puzzles of all sorts. This point in the cycle of the year was manifested at cogean? in the first show of 2019, Matthew Offenbacher’s Hume’s Tume / A Sharper Image.
In the first room of the gallery was “A Sharper Image”, a collection of jigsaw puzzles, set out on card tables and available for assembly, others still in their boxes and wrapped in plastic, ready to purchase and take home. And as part of the recent local tradition, several of the puzzles were also placed on the ferries running from Seattle to Bremerton, available for the cooperative of people passing the time on the hour-long ride.
The puzzles themselves were made by a manufacturer in Slovakia, designed to Matt’s specification and with images that he created using an advanced digital animation software, generally intended for creating product packaging and advertising images. Matt used the software to create lush, otherworldly and almost psychedelic seascapes and underwater landscapes, each design saturated in color and slick with gloss. And all of them featuring orca whales, pristinely rendered, but then oh-so slightly pulled and twisted, their unrealnessexposed. What a symbolic weight these creatures carry for us, and how do we see them when we see them from the decks of the ferry’s and whale watching boats? And how do we respond to the impacts our actions have on them? If we can create them to specification in a digital world, what then? With this work, our participation is invited, to work on the puzzles together, in commune and over time, leaving our progress for the next wave of hands and eyes.
In the second room of the gallery, a puzzle of a different sort is presented with Hume’s Tomb. A single channel video playing on a tv on the floor, the work shows footage of dancer Trisha Brown performing the piece she innovated originally in the 60s, Accummulation. The dance, performed to The Grateful Dead’s Uncle John’s Band, consists of the performer accumulating and repeating different motions, a simple dance blossoming into a full body expression. Over the top of this footage, and in companion to Trisha Brown, Matt has introduced BonziBuddy, a digital avatar from the era of Microsoft’s Clippy, programmed to dance and sing along with Trisha Brown. Not just an alternative representation of Clippy’s functionality, BonziBuddy originally acted as well as spyware, taking a look at its users financial information. Watching the piece, it’s impossible not to attempt to unlock the puzzle of the dance with your own body, nor is it easy to keep from humming the tune that the purple gorilla sings in the beginning. And again, like with “A Sharper Image”, we are presented again with the digital representation of an animal, a blending of the appearance of the natural world with the world of our creation.
The intersecting spheres of our digital and natural worlds, both in the midst of future shaping proportions, are inevitably the places we go in the darkness of the winter. And, though difficult and painful as it is to take stock of ourselves as it is, it is nonetheless important, as it is these considerations that steer us during the seasons of action. And the loving, Mary Poppins-esque trickster that he is, Matt’s work guides us to and through the difficult paths of life with sweetness, puzzles, folk music and dancing, giving us the spoonful of sugar that we need to help the medicine go down.
It’s not all bad though, this turn inward means winter is the season of the mind, of contemplation and meditation, of puzzles of all sorts. This point in the cycle of the year was manifested at cogean? in the first show of 2019, Matthew Offenbacher’s Hume’s Tume / A Sharper Image.
In the first room of the gallery was “A Sharper Image”, a collection of jigsaw puzzles, set out on card tables and available for assembly, others still in their boxes and wrapped in plastic, ready to purchase and take home. And as part of the recent local tradition, several of the puzzles were also placed on the ferries running from Seattle to Bremerton, available for the cooperative of people passing the time on the hour-long ride.
The puzzles themselves were made by a manufacturer in Slovakia, designed to Matt’s specification and with images that he created using an advanced digital animation software, generally intended for creating product packaging and advertising images. Matt used the software to create lush, otherworldly and almost psychedelic seascapes and underwater landscapes, each design saturated in color and slick with gloss. And all of them featuring orca whales, pristinely rendered, but then oh-so slightly pulled and twisted, their unrealnessexposed. What a symbolic weight these creatures carry for us, and how do we see them when we see them from the decks of the ferry’s and whale watching boats? And how do we respond to the impacts our actions have on them? If we can create them to specification in a digital world, what then? With this work, our participation is invited, to work on the puzzles together, in commune and over time, leaving our progress for the next wave of hands and eyes.
In the second room of the gallery, a puzzle of a different sort is presented with Hume’s Tomb. A single channel video playing on a tv on the floor, the work shows footage of dancer Trisha Brown performing the piece she innovated originally in the 60s, Accummulation. The dance, performed to The Grateful Dead’s Uncle John’s Band, consists of the performer accumulating and repeating different motions, a simple dance blossoming into a full body expression. Over the top of this footage, and in companion to Trisha Brown, Matt has introduced BonziBuddy, a digital avatar from the era of Microsoft’s Clippy, programmed to dance and sing along with Trisha Brown. Not just an alternative representation of Clippy’s functionality, BonziBuddy originally acted as well as spyware, taking a look at its users financial information. Watching the piece, it’s impossible not to attempt to unlock the puzzle of the dance with your own body, nor is it easy to keep from humming the tune that the purple gorilla sings in the beginning. And again, like with “A Sharper Image”, we are presented again with the digital representation of an animal, a blending of the appearance of the natural world with the world of our creation.
The intersecting spheres of our digital and natural worlds, both in the midst of future shaping proportions, are inevitably the places we go in the darkness of the winter. And, though difficult and painful as it is to take stock of ourselves as it is, it is nonetheless important, as it is these considerations that steer us during the seasons of action. And the loving, Mary Poppins-esque trickster that he is, Matt’s work guides us to and through the difficult paths of life with sweetness, puzzles, folk music and dancing, giving us the spoonful of sugar that we need to help the medicine go down.
Living with Ellen Ito's COOK
January 2019
The gallery space is pristinely empty. As quickly (and early) as our winter decorations went up this year, so too did they come swiftly down. The emptiness has the refreshing quality of a New Year’s Day polar bear plunge; shocking to a system used to the warmth of winter interiors. Bracing, thrilling, and good for the system and circulation. But also painful. All the more so this new year after this particular winter holiday season, not because of the decorations themselves being put away, but because of the celebrations of love, community and personal history that they were mere dressing to, thanks to Ellen Ito’s show COOK.
The object created for the show was a community cookbook sold to raise funds for local charities. The recipes, stories and illustrations were gathered from some members of the creative community connected to Ellen and cogean?, bound together with black plastic tooth binding, its cover the same light pink as the drapery in the gallery rooms and with Jeremy Mangan’s illustration of our home.
The object itself is exquisite and precisely what it ought to be. It is a portrait of all of us who were involved and contributed, using a form from our collective near past, invigorated with the truth of who we turned out to be and are right now. Misfits at church or temple, school or community club, we have found our new place, and a network of love and care that deserves its own documentation. And not only that, as a community we have a responsibility to share that care with others.
But the object itself was only one piece of the greater work of the show. Family and community recipes are more than instructions for the preparation of food. Combined with their stories, making and eating these recipes constitute the ritual engagement with the networks that bind us through time, space and memory and grant us an experience of the immortal. And rituals are meant to be performed, spells in a grimoire must be cast to work. Through the course of the show Ellen went to people’s homes and cooked meals from the book for them. And for the events of the show the food we served was drawn from the book. And in an age of cooking generally involving smashing together a variety of recipes pulled up online, the recipes from this book focus on just their own small, personal lineages of cooking, strengthened by the rootedness. And to forge connections with others at this depth is miraculous. To learn from Matt Offenbacher’s mother that sunflower seeds are a brilliant addition to lasagne, from Gretchen Bennett that romesco sauce makes roasted vegetables incredible, or from Ellen’s mother that the best fried rice is made with bacon. Through this we are all closer. And to know that these recipes and illustrations are then also being read and performed by those who purchased the book casts an even broader net and creates latent connections waiting to be brought in to the light of a dinner table or party where the food is suddenly so recognizable.
Working in our little domestic, community-cookbook way to help strengthen and expand our community was at the core of why we chose to start cogean? in the first place, and our last year has been abundant in the magic of connection. The gallery space is empty now and for a few more weeks, and we are so ready for another year of forging community, aspiring to do so in a way that comes at least close to the elegance of COOK.
The object created for the show was a community cookbook sold to raise funds for local charities. The recipes, stories and illustrations were gathered from some members of the creative community connected to Ellen and cogean?, bound together with black plastic tooth binding, its cover the same light pink as the drapery in the gallery rooms and with Jeremy Mangan’s illustration of our home.
The object itself is exquisite and precisely what it ought to be. It is a portrait of all of us who were involved and contributed, using a form from our collective near past, invigorated with the truth of who we turned out to be and are right now. Misfits at church or temple, school or community club, we have found our new place, and a network of love and care that deserves its own documentation. And not only that, as a community we have a responsibility to share that care with others.
But the object itself was only one piece of the greater work of the show. Family and community recipes are more than instructions for the preparation of food. Combined with their stories, making and eating these recipes constitute the ritual engagement with the networks that bind us through time, space and memory and grant us an experience of the immortal. And rituals are meant to be performed, spells in a grimoire must be cast to work. Through the course of the show Ellen went to people’s homes and cooked meals from the book for them. And for the events of the show the food we served was drawn from the book. And in an age of cooking generally involving smashing together a variety of recipes pulled up online, the recipes from this book focus on just their own small, personal lineages of cooking, strengthened by the rootedness. And to forge connections with others at this depth is miraculous. To learn from Matt Offenbacher’s mother that sunflower seeds are a brilliant addition to lasagne, from Gretchen Bennett that romesco sauce makes roasted vegetables incredible, or from Ellen’s mother that the best fried rice is made with bacon. Through this we are all closer. And to know that these recipes and illustrations are then also being read and performed by those who purchased the book casts an even broader net and creates latent connections waiting to be brought in to the light of a dinner table or party where the food is suddenly so recognizable.
Working in our little domestic, community-cookbook way to help strengthen and expand our community was at the core of why we chose to start cogean? in the first place, and our last year has been abundant in the magic of connection. The gallery space is empty now and for a few more weeks, and we are so ready for another year of forging community, aspiring to do so in a way that comes at least close to the elegance of COOK.
Living with Jessica McCourt's Hut House
November, 2018
The nights have gotten cold, though the days this fall have been warm, making all the deciduous trees glorious, their burning colors baked in from the fiery summer. Our magnolia tree’s leaves turned yellow with black spots here and there like overripe banana peels, before shedding them, attempting to smother the plants that thrive in its shade. Last year we piled them up in a corner of the garden in a halfhearted compost pile. This year we bagged them up, 12 bags in total. We’ve also moved the lawn furniture into the garage, drained the outdoor faucets and clipped back all the plants that need clipping (others will have to wait until their preferred time of year, later into the fall.) Our sister visited recently, and brought a cooler full of wild game hunted by our father, which now fills our chest freezer, along with the jars of stock and frozen berries. And cabinets throughout the house have been reorganized after the relaxing of systems that comes with the summer months. Finally, we are ready to settle in for the long dark months.
Still so new to the idea of being responsible for a home, we feel often like children who, in the midst of playing house, find the projects of their imaginations come to life, the vague notions of the life of adults solidified into specifics with defined edges and shadows cast. How strange to see the games of our childhood manifest in the world, the logic of it falling together only after the fact, the prophesy being only intelligible after the action has happened. Such is the magic of defining space.
These considerations are particularly on our minds these days in reflection of Jessica McCourt’s artworks occupying the gallery rooms of our house, as she presents her show Hut House, a meditation on the fantastical worlds of our child-selves as the means of creating spaces of safety of ourselves. However, this safe space is not one occupied only by the sweetness and light of a revisionist memory that blots out the reality of childhood. In the walls hang beautifully realized papercut pieces depicting dancing skeletons, severed hands, moths in cages. Over the mantle hangs a cutout of a tiger with its teeth bared. Glowing paper lanterns hang from the ceiling, some painted. On the bookcase is a papercut light box, animal skulls, old naturist guides. In the second room are more glowing lanterns strewn on the floor, surrounding a pink and grey paper chandelier they hangs from the center of the room.
It is as though the dark phantoms of our childhoods, through the exquisitely precise craftsmanship of a mature hand, have been trapped by the sharply cut edge of the paper, floating in their frames, casting impossible light. Made all the more gentle by the colors they are rendered in, a gray-beige the same as the carpets in the gallery, and their backpainting reflecting the pink of the gallery curtains. There they hang, the paper cuts, paper chandelier and painted paper lanterns, glowing but contained—like the animal skulls brought in by the artist and placed on the shelves, trophies from the hunting of the fears of childhood.
And so perhaps, ultimately, this is an adult fantasy, that through the knowledge of repetition, of confrontation, of capturing in guidebooks the knowledge of the world, that we can somehow overcome it and be safe in our forts built of paper and reflected light.
Still so new to the idea of being responsible for a home, we feel often like children who, in the midst of playing house, find the projects of their imaginations come to life, the vague notions of the life of adults solidified into specifics with defined edges and shadows cast. How strange to see the games of our childhood manifest in the world, the logic of it falling together only after the fact, the prophesy being only intelligible after the action has happened. Such is the magic of defining space.
These considerations are particularly on our minds these days in reflection of Jessica McCourt’s artworks occupying the gallery rooms of our house, as she presents her show Hut House, a meditation on the fantastical worlds of our child-selves as the means of creating spaces of safety of ourselves. However, this safe space is not one occupied only by the sweetness and light of a revisionist memory that blots out the reality of childhood. In the walls hang beautifully realized papercut pieces depicting dancing skeletons, severed hands, moths in cages. Over the mantle hangs a cutout of a tiger with its teeth bared. Glowing paper lanterns hang from the ceiling, some painted. On the bookcase is a papercut light box, animal skulls, old naturist guides. In the second room are more glowing lanterns strewn on the floor, surrounding a pink and grey paper chandelier they hangs from the center of the room.
It is as though the dark phantoms of our childhoods, through the exquisitely precise craftsmanship of a mature hand, have been trapped by the sharply cut edge of the paper, floating in their frames, casting impossible light. Made all the more gentle by the colors they are rendered in, a gray-beige the same as the carpets in the gallery, and their backpainting reflecting the pink of the gallery curtains. There they hang, the paper cuts, paper chandelier and painted paper lanterns, glowing but contained—like the animal skulls brought in by the artist and placed on the shelves, trophies from the hunting of the fears of childhood.
And so perhaps, ultimately, this is an adult fantasy, that through the knowledge of repetition, of confrontation, of capturing in guidebooks the knowledge of the world, that we can somehow overcome it and be safe in our forts built of paper and reflected light.
Living with Catherine Cross Uehara's Bright Clippings
Ben Gannon, September 2018
July and August, more than other months, maybe even more than February, are months that stand magically still. Time warps and everything takes either longer or shorter than it should. Moving quickly is impossible, and the only appealing thing to do is look at beautiful things. It’s the perfect time to paint our fence, its bold red stain too much for us, but that will wait until September, when the school year starts and the 16+ years of conditioning to get back to work kicks in. Even the air is disinclined to busy along its course around the globe, leaving us to breathe in the consequences of our species’ actions and look at the monstrous beauty of a reddened sun - a sun that, for the moment at least, can be seen differently, and covered in the red light that passes through the smoke, we see the world differently.
A similar time-stasis and light shift has been triggered in our front rooms by way of Catherine Cross Uehara’s show Bright Clippings.
The show is an homage to an ordered simulation of the sculptural work of her life at home, a space composed of shattered boundaries between work and life, public and private, complete and ongoing. A home, moreover, that she will only occupy for a few more months before fully resettling in Bremerton.
Catherine refers to herself mostly as a painter, and her obvious deftness with classical technique is clear. Undeniably beautiful floral paintings on canvas and floral sketches pulled from her sketchbook and pinned to the walls, are all composed of lovely brushwork. But more than just painting, Catherine’s work is interested in the four dimensions that her painting takes place in. For Catherine it’s not just the paintings that are the art - it’s the paintings, in space, and over time that matters. The element of time is explored through the paintings on view in the show, though indeed all of Catherine’s works struggle against the notion of completion. Some of the canvasses have barely a few layers of foundational color, while others are years old and ongoing. They are like slow-ripening fruit, available for consuming at any time, their flavor and texture from refreshing-bitter to drunken-sweet.
Along with the element of time, the element of space manifests in the show. Through the assemblage of objects, books and small artworks arranged on the bookcase in our living room, in the spontaneously but artfully arranged ikebana pieces, the faux wood sofa with pillows with the likeness of an ape from Planet of the Apes, the markers of the space where the paintings and drawings have been created, a sample of the loam of materials and possibilities of Catherine’s soon-to-be-vacated studio and apartment.
In the same way that the smoke from the fires filters out certain wavelengths of light, allowing us to hone in on a particular spectrum and look more directly at the light, this show, in pulling just certain elements of her work, process and life, Bright Clippings reveals some of the more particular elements of Catherine’s work and allows us to hear a few notes in the symphonic regeneration process of her work. The summer gives us this glimpse, this slow moment and segment in time, a brief moment before we all get back to work and the artworks from the show rejoin the churn of life in a new place.
[originally commissioned for cogean?]
A similar time-stasis and light shift has been triggered in our front rooms by way of Catherine Cross Uehara’s show Bright Clippings.
The show is an homage to an ordered simulation of the sculptural work of her life at home, a space composed of shattered boundaries between work and life, public and private, complete and ongoing. A home, moreover, that she will only occupy for a few more months before fully resettling in Bremerton.
Catherine refers to herself mostly as a painter, and her obvious deftness with classical technique is clear. Undeniably beautiful floral paintings on canvas and floral sketches pulled from her sketchbook and pinned to the walls, are all composed of lovely brushwork. But more than just painting, Catherine’s work is interested in the four dimensions that her painting takes place in. For Catherine it’s not just the paintings that are the art - it’s the paintings, in space, and over time that matters. The element of time is explored through the paintings on view in the show, though indeed all of Catherine’s works struggle against the notion of completion. Some of the canvasses have barely a few layers of foundational color, while others are years old and ongoing. They are like slow-ripening fruit, available for consuming at any time, their flavor and texture from refreshing-bitter to drunken-sweet.
Along with the element of time, the element of space manifests in the show. Through the assemblage of objects, books and small artworks arranged on the bookcase in our living room, in the spontaneously but artfully arranged ikebana pieces, the faux wood sofa with pillows with the likeness of an ape from Planet of the Apes, the markers of the space where the paintings and drawings have been created, a sample of the loam of materials and possibilities of Catherine’s soon-to-be-vacated studio and apartment.
In the same way that the smoke from the fires filters out certain wavelengths of light, allowing us to hone in on a particular spectrum and look more directly at the light, this show, in pulling just certain elements of her work, process and life, Bright Clippings reveals some of the more particular elements of Catherine’s work and allows us to hear a few notes in the symphonic regeneration process of her work. The summer gives us this glimpse, this slow moment and segment in time, a brief moment before we all get back to work and the artworks from the show rejoin the churn of life in a new place.
[originally commissioned for cogean?]
Living with Marie Weichman's RESIDUE
Ben Gannon, June 2018
It's June, and wet. Then sunny, then wet. We put off our spring cleaning until after we wrapped up our goals for the garden in our back yard. We might have even gone a little overboard with two new cherry trees and thirteen roses finding homes in an empty parking strip with good light. But now having planted those trees and bushes, both our garden budget for the year, and our excuse to avoid addressing the nightmare happening in our garage are gone. And so we broke down all the boxes and bagged up all of the packaging, organizing like with like. Most of what we stuffed in this last space for us in our home to truly occupy is the remnants of our moving here, the generosity of our friends by way of our wedding registry, landscaping materials, and old artworks to big to store in the house. The remainders, leftovers and residues of the recent changes of our lives. And as we go through he process of tidying up, which is really most difficult because it is so full of decisions, we can’t help but be moved by the artistic spirit (part magpie/part beaver) to wonder what things we could create with these leftover materials.
Upstairs and in the opposite corner of the house from the garage, this question about leftovers is formally asked and answered by Marie Weichman's installation RESIDUE for cogean? to subtle, warm and beautiful effect.
On one wall, within in a double circle of perfectly placed pins, hangs a meticulously constructed crown made of used tea bags. Bound together at the center with red thread, the long strands dangling from the crown evoke menstruation and birth. On the same wall, to the left of the crown, is pinned a smaller piece: two silk tea bags, emptied of their contents and then sewn back together, their steeping threads then tied together. Lightly they hang from the pin like ghostly testicles.
Grouped on the shelves that separate the gallery space from our kitchen, so at home in the space that they may be confused for possessions, are a series of seductively glazed mugs with satisfyingly delicate edges but substantial proportion, all stamped with a spiral, floral motif. Next to the mugs and hanging above the mantle this same motif, a motif from a tattoo on Marie's body, is painted in gold on a large field of delicate browns and beiges. Used coffee filters patched together, hanging from two tiny gold grommets, so light that it responds whenever you walk by it, its gold flourish responding as well to the shift in light.
Brimming and cascading out of all the shelves in the bookcase and on to the fireplace and mantel, picking up the gold tone from the painting over the mantle with their yellow paint, are hundreds of slip cast honey bears. Originally made for an exhibition a decade ago, they are born anew in their reemergence in a different context.
In the second room of the gallery, on a low white plinth in the center of the room, centered on the south facing window, sits a bent-wire sculpture, clearly once and distinctly no longer a vital component of something or another, but now warped and folded into art. On the wall to the west of the sculpture hang three works: a mixed media 'landscape' on a wooden board, a drawing on cardboard, and a rectangular piece of resin holding together slipcast egg shells. To the west, a collection of prints of animals, works Marie may be best known for in our town.
All of these layers of past and present, new works and old come together and feel so at home in the space. In their colors and textures, subjects and materials they are camouflaged in the domestic space, blending in with our daily lives. And yet at the same time pushing us to think anew about the possibilities of the mundane and overlooked materials and possibilities in our lives.
What does it look like to care for what is left over? Not only the physical left overs from creation processes like making a pot of coffee or a collection of ceramic pieces for an art show, but also the ways of being and knowing ourselves that, while still true, are true because they existed once but have transformed into something new over time and through space? How do we artfully integrate the past with the present? It is something like the way that Marie's show, like herself, is bold, experimental, confident and kind.
[originally commission by cogean?]
Upstairs and in the opposite corner of the house from the garage, this question about leftovers is formally asked and answered by Marie Weichman's installation RESIDUE for cogean? to subtle, warm and beautiful effect.
On one wall, within in a double circle of perfectly placed pins, hangs a meticulously constructed crown made of used tea bags. Bound together at the center with red thread, the long strands dangling from the crown evoke menstruation and birth. On the same wall, to the left of the crown, is pinned a smaller piece: two silk tea bags, emptied of their contents and then sewn back together, their steeping threads then tied together. Lightly they hang from the pin like ghostly testicles.
Grouped on the shelves that separate the gallery space from our kitchen, so at home in the space that they may be confused for possessions, are a series of seductively glazed mugs with satisfyingly delicate edges but substantial proportion, all stamped with a spiral, floral motif. Next to the mugs and hanging above the mantle this same motif, a motif from a tattoo on Marie's body, is painted in gold on a large field of delicate browns and beiges. Used coffee filters patched together, hanging from two tiny gold grommets, so light that it responds whenever you walk by it, its gold flourish responding as well to the shift in light.
Brimming and cascading out of all the shelves in the bookcase and on to the fireplace and mantel, picking up the gold tone from the painting over the mantle with their yellow paint, are hundreds of slip cast honey bears. Originally made for an exhibition a decade ago, they are born anew in their reemergence in a different context.
In the second room of the gallery, on a low white plinth in the center of the room, centered on the south facing window, sits a bent-wire sculpture, clearly once and distinctly no longer a vital component of something or another, but now warped and folded into art. On the wall to the west of the sculpture hang three works: a mixed media 'landscape' on a wooden board, a drawing on cardboard, and a rectangular piece of resin holding together slipcast egg shells. To the west, a collection of prints of animals, works Marie may be best known for in our town.
All of these layers of past and present, new works and old come together and feel so at home in the space. In their colors and textures, subjects and materials they are camouflaged in the domestic space, blending in with our daily lives. And yet at the same time pushing us to think anew about the possibilities of the mundane and overlooked materials and possibilities in our lives.
What does it look like to care for what is left over? Not only the physical left overs from creation processes like making a pot of coffee or a collection of ceramic pieces for an art show, but also the ways of being and knowing ourselves that, while still true, are true because they existed once but have transformed into something new over time and through space? How do we artfully integrate the past with the present? It is something like the way that Marie's show, like herself, is bold, experimental, confident and kind.
[originally commission by cogean?]
Living with Erin Frost's traces/you know the way
Ben Gannon, April 2018
It's Sunday, April 1st and spring is upon us. The sprawling branches of the magnolia tree in our back yard are covered in an extravaganza of white and pink flowers. The weeping birch tree in the front yard is shaggy with its pollen packed threads. Both trees show off their spring looks in the sunny wind, dancing as they do in their bobbing and whooshing way. The house smells of roasted garlic and the saijo persimmon candle burning on the mantle. A guest is currently with us, recuperating in the bedroom downstairs. In the front rooms of our home, where cogean? resides, a techno-magical ritual is underway: Erin Frost’s installation is miraculously generating an in-between space - neither our home in Bremerton nor Erin's apartment studio in Seattle, but one that combines them and connects them across time and space through objects of memory.
The central and title work of the show, traces/you know the way, is a video playing on a large screen television in front of the living room windows, framed by our light pink curtains. Those curtains and that window appear in the video, as well as their facsimiles created in Erin's studio. In front of these backdrops she performs while collapsing the 20 mile distance between these two spaces. The footage jumps variously from holding pink roses, cellophane wrap, or clutching the fabric of the curtains of the pink slip she wears. The slip from the film is also physically present in the space, hanging over the mantle echoing the femininity of the curtains. The room, in fact, is full of objects involved in or created during the generation of the film. In one vivid vignette from the film Erin uses one finger to pull red paint across the heart line of her hand lead to a series of Rorschach images framed in gold frames and hanged on the wall to the left of the front room windows where the film is playing, taking on forms of hearts, fairies and butterflies. And more: on the bookcase to the left of the fireplace is a series of still images, Polaroids, all of their images distinctly birthed from the film. On the lowest shelf, below all the photos, is a pink rose painted in gold - the same rose as the one being painted in the video.
In the room to the south of the living room, what would be our dining room, another film plays, much more simple than the one in the main room but no less hypnotic and alluring. In it there are roses arranged against mirrors with all their blooms pointing inward. One of the flowers is pulled back and then pushed forward, creating a miraculous floral heartbeat for the space as it move in and out ad infinitum, the simply magic of mirrors dazzling like glass cut to refract light. A virtuosic video particularly considering it seems digitally manipulated but is in fact just brilliantly composed.
On a gold stand in the corner of the main room is a stack of cards with the text “retrace the outline/drawing stronger still/your tenderness” printed into one side, backward, and embossed, near-invisibly, on the other half.
Most of the works braided in to the installation were created out of the fusion of our space and her own home studio. However, there are objects from her home and artworks not made specifically with this show in mind incorporated seamlessly as a balance to the nature of our ownership of the space. A shelf of ceramic champagne corks, dripping with gold luster, the stand displaying the cards, a small vessel containing gilded flower petals.
In a strange way the two video works playing endlessly in the space, sometimes for the specific purpose of the gallery and sometimes for us to have playing, inhabiting our rooms, can be connected through contrast to films like Paranormal Activity and The Ring. In all the ways that the technology of those films reveals the horror of the existence, so to does Erin use these technologies to cast messages of love, warmth hope, strength, courage and vulnerability into the world.
And in taking these video works together along with the objects arranged around them in the space, the overall effect is in part Lynchian. We sometimes refer to the gallery space as The Pink Room, as though it were one of the extra-dimensional spaces visited in the Twin Peaks series. In its familiarity and also its strangeness, there is both safety and risk. This miraculous space that Erin’s distinct attention to subtlety and her ability to combine contradictory phenomena into cohesive expression has created, is, most definitively, a nexus for the exhilarating paradox of love.
[originally commissioned for cogean?]
The central and title work of the show, traces/you know the way, is a video playing on a large screen television in front of the living room windows, framed by our light pink curtains. Those curtains and that window appear in the video, as well as their facsimiles created in Erin's studio. In front of these backdrops she performs while collapsing the 20 mile distance between these two spaces. The footage jumps variously from holding pink roses, cellophane wrap, or clutching the fabric of the curtains of the pink slip she wears. The slip from the film is also physically present in the space, hanging over the mantle echoing the femininity of the curtains. The room, in fact, is full of objects involved in or created during the generation of the film. In one vivid vignette from the film Erin uses one finger to pull red paint across the heart line of her hand lead to a series of Rorschach images framed in gold frames and hanged on the wall to the left of the front room windows where the film is playing, taking on forms of hearts, fairies and butterflies. And more: on the bookcase to the left of the fireplace is a series of still images, Polaroids, all of their images distinctly birthed from the film. On the lowest shelf, below all the photos, is a pink rose painted in gold - the same rose as the one being painted in the video.
In the room to the south of the living room, what would be our dining room, another film plays, much more simple than the one in the main room but no less hypnotic and alluring. In it there are roses arranged against mirrors with all their blooms pointing inward. One of the flowers is pulled back and then pushed forward, creating a miraculous floral heartbeat for the space as it move in and out ad infinitum, the simply magic of mirrors dazzling like glass cut to refract light. A virtuosic video particularly considering it seems digitally manipulated but is in fact just brilliantly composed.
On a gold stand in the corner of the main room is a stack of cards with the text “retrace the outline/drawing stronger still/your tenderness” printed into one side, backward, and embossed, near-invisibly, on the other half.
Most of the works braided in to the installation were created out of the fusion of our space and her own home studio. However, there are objects from her home and artworks not made specifically with this show in mind incorporated seamlessly as a balance to the nature of our ownership of the space. A shelf of ceramic champagne corks, dripping with gold luster, the stand displaying the cards, a small vessel containing gilded flower petals.
In a strange way the two video works playing endlessly in the space, sometimes for the specific purpose of the gallery and sometimes for us to have playing, inhabiting our rooms, can be connected through contrast to films like Paranormal Activity and The Ring. In all the ways that the technology of those films reveals the horror of the existence, so to does Erin use these technologies to cast messages of love, warmth hope, strength, courage and vulnerability into the world.
And in taking these video works together along with the objects arranged around them in the space, the overall effect is in part Lynchian. We sometimes refer to the gallery space as The Pink Room, as though it were one of the extra-dimensional spaces visited in the Twin Peaks series. In its familiarity and also its strangeness, there is both safety and risk. This miraculous space that Erin’s distinct attention to subtlety and her ability to combine contradictory phenomena into cohesive expression has created, is, most definitively, a nexus for the exhilarating paradox of love.
[originally commissioned for cogean?]
Wisdom of the Underworld / Joey Veltkamp
Ben Gannon, 2017
Arriving at Joey Veltkamp’s February 2017 Vignettes exhibit, it was clear from the street looking into Rachel and John’s house that this show was dealing with the supernatural. Hanging in the front room window were sheer fabric panels with appliqué patches of heavily shadowed and made-up eyes announced the other-worldliness. Spirits are present and in many forms. A haunted space, like all indoor spaces at the end of winter, so charged with telekinetic and telepathic energy of its occupant(s). A haunted house, but in January (unlike October) we are familiar with ghosts, and in the January of this year the powers of naked death ascended to the leadership of the world.
Once inside and in the first room of the show there hangs, along with the sheer panels, a large black quilt. It is composed of spells and talismans, each smaller square housing a symbol of power and protection, an anchor point from which to journey into darkness. Skulls, crystals, pentagrams, the word “protect” in appliquéd ‘wood’ letters—homage to Gretchen Frances Bennett’s found stick word art.
Sharing the space with the eyes and the spell quilt were a pair of pillows placed on chairs, each with a broken heart emoji, invoking the kind and tragic power of Laura Palmer, another symbol of strength and resistance. It becomes clear that wherever the journey of these artworks is headed, grounding in power is necessary and some danger is present or lies ahead.
In the next room more sheer panels hang in the windows and more eyes look out from the gauzy material. Along with the eyed panels there was a table full of small ceramic ghosts painted up like the cosmos and sitting on small, round mirror disks, the infinity of their motif reflecting into infinity. There is little distinction in Joey’s work between outer space and the underworld – vacuum and death both infinite and un-survivable phenomenon.
Binding this second room with the first was a pair of flags and a new motif for Joey’s work – a black cat appears on the flags, almost identical to each other—the latter done by memory, on opposite faces of a wall, each with the phrase Déjà Vu appearing on it, the lettering the same but the colors slightly different and the cat figure in slightly different positions. This diptych is a direct reference to the movie The Matrix, where the repeated sighting of the same black cat as an experience of deja vu is revealed to be an indicator that there has been a significant change made to the fabric of the world of the matrix. Not only a personification of the phenomena of change, the cat is our familiar and our guide while traveling through the dimensions.
Also hanging with the eyes, the cats, and the cosmic ghosts is one of three quilts of its kind in the show. Multi-tonal, textured blacks patched together, the chorus of darkness interrupted with flashes of heat and light in the form of randomly sized triangles, trapezoids, parallelograms and rhombuses of color. Two more of these burning landscapes hang on the walls leading up the stairs to the final room of the show. Akin to the blending of the underworld with outer space depicted with the ceramic ghosts, the landscapes depicted in these three quilts is both of the fire of space and the fires of hell. Accompanied by the indifferent harbinger in the form of the black cat, we are walking with Joey through the cosmic underworld.
The final space of the show, past the watching eyes and glittering ghosts and burning voids, is the bedroom upstairs. The sole artwork in the room is a quilt lying on the bed. The cats again appear; this time en masse and in distinctly different poses, on the quilt upstairs, the resident housecat Brigitte having found a comfortable spot for itself on the bed as well.
But what are the lessons from hell and the vacuum, of walking through this heartbreak simulation? Joey’s work participates strongly in the realm of the pop culture oracular, pulling in and manipulating the signs of culture of the moment, playing in their subtleties and shifting them around before casting them back in to the infinite sign constellation in the form of fabric objects with meanings made from Joey’s particular alchemy of working with sadness and elementally reconfiguring it into joy.
But all oracles have limits to their vision into the ocean of possibilities. And it is the brave or unprotected oracles that, in the midst of confusion, go deeper, towards the leveling wisdom of infinity and death, and the freedom brought forth from acknowledging that wisdom. In the face of the cruel madness and absurdity so evident in our world at this time, the reminder of our death is a reminder of our life. In the face of the infinite void of space, we are able to refocus on ourselves with a grounded perspective.
But it is not all grim contemplations of death and freedom and endless emptiness, and the cats in their various poses on the final quilt in the show remind us of that. With each change or glitch in the fabric of our worlds, with each appearance of the cat as a harbinger of change, there nonetheless remains the infinity of other worlds with other changes and glitches occurring all at once. If the wisdom to be gained from passing through hell and space is the infinite of the void, the wisdom to be gained from the multiplicity of black cats is the rich infinity of being, existence and possibility.
[originally commissioned by Vignettes]
Once inside and in the first room of the show there hangs, along with the sheer panels, a large black quilt. It is composed of spells and talismans, each smaller square housing a symbol of power and protection, an anchor point from which to journey into darkness. Skulls, crystals, pentagrams, the word “protect” in appliquéd ‘wood’ letters—homage to Gretchen Frances Bennett’s found stick word art.
Sharing the space with the eyes and the spell quilt were a pair of pillows placed on chairs, each with a broken heart emoji, invoking the kind and tragic power of Laura Palmer, another symbol of strength and resistance. It becomes clear that wherever the journey of these artworks is headed, grounding in power is necessary and some danger is present or lies ahead.
In the next room more sheer panels hang in the windows and more eyes look out from the gauzy material. Along with the eyed panels there was a table full of small ceramic ghosts painted up like the cosmos and sitting on small, round mirror disks, the infinity of their motif reflecting into infinity. There is little distinction in Joey’s work between outer space and the underworld – vacuum and death both infinite and un-survivable phenomenon.
Binding this second room with the first was a pair of flags and a new motif for Joey’s work – a black cat appears on the flags, almost identical to each other—the latter done by memory, on opposite faces of a wall, each with the phrase Déjà Vu appearing on it, the lettering the same but the colors slightly different and the cat figure in slightly different positions. This diptych is a direct reference to the movie The Matrix, where the repeated sighting of the same black cat as an experience of deja vu is revealed to be an indicator that there has been a significant change made to the fabric of the world of the matrix. Not only a personification of the phenomena of change, the cat is our familiar and our guide while traveling through the dimensions.
Also hanging with the eyes, the cats, and the cosmic ghosts is one of three quilts of its kind in the show. Multi-tonal, textured blacks patched together, the chorus of darkness interrupted with flashes of heat and light in the form of randomly sized triangles, trapezoids, parallelograms and rhombuses of color. Two more of these burning landscapes hang on the walls leading up the stairs to the final room of the show. Akin to the blending of the underworld with outer space depicted with the ceramic ghosts, the landscapes depicted in these three quilts is both of the fire of space and the fires of hell. Accompanied by the indifferent harbinger in the form of the black cat, we are walking with Joey through the cosmic underworld.
The final space of the show, past the watching eyes and glittering ghosts and burning voids, is the bedroom upstairs. The sole artwork in the room is a quilt lying on the bed. The cats again appear; this time en masse and in distinctly different poses, on the quilt upstairs, the resident housecat Brigitte having found a comfortable spot for itself on the bed as well.
But what are the lessons from hell and the vacuum, of walking through this heartbreak simulation? Joey’s work participates strongly in the realm of the pop culture oracular, pulling in and manipulating the signs of culture of the moment, playing in their subtleties and shifting them around before casting them back in to the infinite sign constellation in the form of fabric objects with meanings made from Joey’s particular alchemy of working with sadness and elementally reconfiguring it into joy.
But all oracles have limits to their vision into the ocean of possibilities. And it is the brave or unprotected oracles that, in the midst of confusion, go deeper, towards the leveling wisdom of infinity and death, and the freedom brought forth from acknowledging that wisdom. In the face of the cruel madness and absurdity so evident in our world at this time, the reminder of our death is a reminder of our life. In the face of the infinite void of space, we are able to refocus on ourselves with a grounded perspective.
But it is not all grim contemplations of death and freedom and endless emptiness, and the cats in their various poses on the final quilt in the show remind us of that. With each change or glitch in the fabric of our worlds, with each appearance of the cat as a harbinger of change, there nonetheless remains the infinity of other worlds with other changes and glitches occurring all at once. If the wisdom to be gained from passing through hell and space is the infinite of the void, the wisdom to be gained from the multiplicity of black cats is the rich infinity of being, existence and possibility.
[originally commissioned by Vignettes]
On Hope and the New Frontier / Cable Griffith
Ben Gannon, 2016
In January, G. Gibson Gallery presented Cable Griffith’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, this time featuring paintings about UFO sightings. This beautiful body of work continues the video game aesthetic Griffith has been cultivating for the better part of a decade with a dark, rich palette. His scenery describes a broad range of geography, but the dominant use of greens, blues, browns, and blacks are strong enough to suggest a wet, dark, and cold northerly location—our Pacific Northwest location. When warm colors appear like red or orange, they contrast brightly but still interlock with the rest. The compositions aren’t made of sharply defined lines, only shapes of color. His rigid pixelated-pop style creates a variance to the organic shapes, colors and underlying painterliness of his brushwork.
There is a general logic to most of the paintings: nature and object. They each present a different view of the same fictional world which feels, for the most part, complete and coherent. This logic creates rules governing what is, and how. It’s rigorous. And as a result of this rigour, the “sightings,” represented as they are in the style Griffith explores, are incorporated into the environments of his pieces in the same way that everything else represented is incorporated. There is no significant difference between the trees, the land, the water, the sky or the lights in the sky. In Griffith’s world, they are all real and manifest in the same way, each of them natural, and treated as such.
There are two pieces in the show where this rule-based harmony doesn’t feel quite so true. In Maury Island, the “sighting” appears to hover; alien and out of place in the environment. This amplifies our attention on the utopia in Griffith’s other works, and particularly when grouped together in chorus with one another. In Two Lights in the Woods, there’s a waterfall in the bottom left section. The brush is boldly revealed in a swathe of unruly water spray. What the brush stroke in Two Lights calls attention to is that behind the seamless fusion of the natural world, space, and the digital world that Cable presents, is Cable himself. That this surreal world is largely coherent is a result of it being represented coherently by the artist.
"Between comprehension and terror is the truth. Anything else is just a well-told story."
This series is an engagement with storytelling, both in the pieces that present complete stories, and in works like Maury Island and Two Lights that get their power from breaking the rules laid down for the others. These are paintings that all share the general subject matter—accounts and stories of reported sightings. And Griffith’s painterly style itself is a sort of retelling. They are paintings based on digital representations of the perceived world of the digital designer; paintings of artifacts, both memorial and material, in a recreated world; based on a digital world; based on an imaginary world; based on the physical world. These are the stories of stories about stories in a style of a style.
The effect of all this—beautiful visions in and of a mythological world—called into question as they are throughout, is a sense of uneasy hope. By combining the aesthetics of digital world, video games, UFOs, and space; Griffith bridges several great human horizons. He envelopes them in natural environments, suggesting there is the chance of comprehension and maybe even mastery over these forces. They are our future. But even as the hope of understanding and mastery is presented, so are the reminders that this hope is yet another story of a story— it is something we are being told about.
When it comes to having reasons to hope there is indeed a next frontier, and that we will have access to it, Griffith’s stories seem timely. The commercialization of space is steadily underway, and the recent news of SpaceX’s successful return of a stage 1 rocket, typically lost in a launch, seems to assure future profitability. The digital world is more rich and complex than we have language to describe. And finally the truth we have all resigned ourselves to— that we will continue to pillage our planet until it is completely uninhabitable—necessitates the need for hope beyond Earth. And what is true of hope is that it is a story we tell ourselves to keep going more than it is a true representation of the world. For truth, it's best to look at the midpoint between the paintings in Sightings and Lovecraft’s work. Between comprehension and terror is the truth. Anything else is just a well-told story. Cable is a wizard of a storyteller, and his world is worth visiting.
Today, Saturday, 16 January is the last day to see Sightings; but any remaining work from the show is available to view by appointment at G. Gibson Gallery.
— Author Ben Gannon is a Seattle-based artist and sometimes philosopher. He attended Whitman College, where he co-founded the arts periodical Quarterlife Magazine. His work has been shown at NEPO 5K Don't Run, Cupcake Royale, and 12th Ave Arts Center for their inaugural celebration Garden Variety, curated by Amanda Manitach.
[originally commissioned by Bridge Productions]
In January, G. Gibson Gallery presented Cable Griffith’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, this time featuring paintings about UFO sightings. This beautiful body of work continues the video game aesthetic Griffith has been cultivating for the better part of a decade with a dark, rich palette. His scenery describes a broad range of geography, but the dominant use of greens, blues, browns, and blacks are strong enough to suggest a wet, dark, and cold northerly location—our Pacific Northwest location. When warm colors appear like red or orange, they contrast brightly but still interlock with the rest. The compositions aren’t made of sharply defined lines, only shapes of color. His rigid pixelated-pop style creates a variance to the organic shapes, colors and underlying painterliness of his brushwork.
There is a general logic to most of the paintings: nature and object. They each present a different view of the same fictional world which feels, for the most part, complete and coherent. This logic creates rules governing what is, and how. It’s rigorous. And as a result of this rigour, the “sightings,” represented as they are in the style Griffith explores, are incorporated into the environments of his pieces in the same way that everything else represented is incorporated. There is no significant difference between the trees, the land, the water, the sky or the lights in the sky. In Griffith’s world, they are all real and manifest in the same way, each of them natural, and treated as such.
There are two pieces in the show where this rule-based harmony doesn’t feel quite so true. In Maury Island, the “sighting” appears to hover; alien and out of place in the environment. This amplifies our attention on the utopia in Griffith’s other works, and particularly when grouped together in chorus with one another. In Two Lights in the Woods, there’s a waterfall in the bottom left section. The brush is boldly revealed in a swathe of unruly water spray. What the brush stroke in Two Lights calls attention to is that behind the seamless fusion of the natural world, space, and the digital world that Cable presents, is Cable himself. That this surreal world is largely coherent is a result of it being represented coherently by the artist.
"Between comprehension and terror is the truth. Anything else is just a well-told story."
This series is an engagement with storytelling, both in the pieces that present complete stories, and in works like Maury Island and Two Lights that get their power from breaking the rules laid down for the others. These are paintings that all share the general subject matter—accounts and stories of reported sightings. And Griffith’s painterly style itself is a sort of retelling. They are paintings based on digital representations of the perceived world of the digital designer; paintings of artifacts, both memorial and material, in a recreated world; based on a digital world; based on an imaginary world; based on the physical world. These are the stories of stories about stories in a style of a style.
The effect of all this—beautiful visions in and of a mythological world—called into question as they are throughout, is a sense of uneasy hope. By combining the aesthetics of digital world, video games, UFOs, and space; Griffith bridges several great human horizons. He envelopes them in natural environments, suggesting there is the chance of comprehension and maybe even mastery over these forces. They are our future. But even as the hope of understanding and mastery is presented, so are the reminders that this hope is yet another story of a story— it is something we are being told about.
When it comes to having reasons to hope there is indeed a next frontier, and that we will have access to it, Griffith’s stories seem timely. The commercialization of space is steadily underway, and the recent news of SpaceX’s successful return of a stage 1 rocket, typically lost in a launch, seems to assure future profitability. The digital world is more rich and complex than we have language to describe. And finally the truth we have all resigned ourselves to— that we will continue to pillage our planet until it is completely uninhabitable—necessitates the need for hope beyond Earth. And what is true of hope is that it is a story we tell ourselves to keep going more than it is a true representation of the world. For truth, it's best to look at the midpoint between the paintings in Sightings and Lovecraft’s work. Between comprehension and terror is the truth. Anything else is just a well-told story. Cable is a wizard of a storyteller, and his world is worth visiting.
Today, Saturday, 16 January is the last day to see Sightings; but any remaining work from the show is available to view by appointment at G. Gibson Gallery.
— Author Ben Gannon is a Seattle-based artist and sometimes philosopher. He attended Whitman College, where he co-founded the arts periodical Quarterlife Magazine. His work has been shown at NEPO 5K Don't Run, Cupcake Royale, and 12th Ave Arts Center for their inaugural celebration Garden Variety, curated by Amanda Manitach.
[originally commissioned by Bridge Productions]
The Fragile Body / Trung Pham
Ben Gannon, 2016
In his first solo exhibition of works in Seattle, recently on view at Tobya Gallery, Trung Pham presents a collection of meditative abstract oil paintings and small sculptures carved from wood and bars of soap.
As objects, Pham has used a masterful hand and a connection to materials to create seductive and satisfying pieces. He has a particular deftness with oil and canvas and gives the paintings a sense of life that is oil paint at its best. There are built up globules of pigment like swollen tissue, valleys of color like exposed flesh, and areas around the edges of the surface where the paint is scraped across the canvas like a skinned knee. The warm beige of the raw canvas material feels like an extension of the paint - less a surface to be marked and more an earthy facet of a fully considered object.
His paintings are immediately sensuous and evocative of the body, and specifically bodies in transformative states. The paintings are broken up into three specific title groups, each being a Wound, a Crack, or a Rupture. These works are about the trauma of the body, and yet there is little horror to them. Neither is there over-aestheticization or glorification. Rather there is a sense of holistic consideration – not sterile or clinical so not the domain of a doctor or researcher – it is the realm of the nurse and the homeopath. These are traumas to be cared for, that have physical and spiritual dimension.
Indeed, the tenderness of the artworks and the effective evocation of the body with abstraction only present the traumas of the body, but also the pleasures. Allowing these wounds, ruptures and cracks to be read as mouths, nipples, vaginas and anuses, these paintings maintain the same posture, too kind to be clinical, but also tranquil rather than passionate.
It is this tension between pleasure and trauma, life and death, that makes these paintings such effective evocations of the wounds of Christ, and indeed why the wounds of Christ are such effective symbols. Like the dynamic tension of the yin/yang symbol, the wounds of Christ represent the place between – the moment of transformation. More contemporarily, Octavia Butler’s Earthseed faith statement speaks directly to this:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
Equally sensuous and made with the same textural dynamism, but less centered around the body, are the sculptural works presented. Particularly memorable are two pieces carved from bars of soap and two carved from blocks of wood. The two made from soap depict sofas, which seem to be rising away from the block of material they are carved from, detached from gravity and the laws of physics. They are sturdily carved but elementally delicate, the gestures of the sofas floating harmoniously with the material whose telos is to dissolve miraculously from a solid into bubbles, transforming things from dirty to clean.
The two sculptures made from blocks of wood represent furniture again, this time chairs. Unlike the pieces carved from soap, the chairs are stably seated, all four legs growing out of the un-carved base of the block. But they too have been subjected to the forces of change. The support on one of the chairs has been carefully chipped away and is on the cusp of breaking. The other, all the more substantially formed, has been blasted with fire and is scorched, accentuating all of the chisel cuts made into the wood. And though wood as a material can last for centuries, those of us who live in Matt Offenbacher’s green gothic world of the Pacific Northwest, wood is a material that rots and decays and blends itself back into life and rebirth.
Trung’s work, overall, is surprising, not despite its tranquility, but because each work is able to so effectively evoke tranquility in tandem with the forces of change. This combination is the crux of Trung’s work, which is so beautifully meditative not because it creates an experience separate from the slings and arrows of life, but rather because it incorporates the pleasures and pains of life into the tranquility.
As objects, Pham has used a masterful hand and a connection to materials to create seductive and satisfying pieces. He has a particular deftness with oil and canvas and gives the paintings a sense of life that is oil paint at its best. There are built up globules of pigment like swollen tissue, valleys of color like exposed flesh, and areas around the edges of the surface where the paint is scraped across the canvas like a skinned knee. The warm beige of the raw canvas material feels like an extension of the paint - less a surface to be marked and more an earthy facet of a fully considered object.
His paintings are immediately sensuous and evocative of the body, and specifically bodies in transformative states. The paintings are broken up into three specific title groups, each being a Wound, a Crack, or a Rupture. These works are about the trauma of the body, and yet there is little horror to them. Neither is there over-aestheticization or glorification. Rather there is a sense of holistic consideration – not sterile or clinical so not the domain of a doctor or researcher – it is the realm of the nurse and the homeopath. These are traumas to be cared for, that have physical and spiritual dimension.
Indeed, the tenderness of the artworks and the effective evocation of the body with abstraction only present the traumas of the body, but also the pleasures. Allowing these wounds, ruptures and cracks to be read as mouths, nipples, vaginas and anuses, these paintings maintain the same posture, too kind to be clinical, but also tranquil rather than passionate.
It is this tension between pleasure and trauma, life and death, that makes these paintings such effective evocations of the wounds of Christ, and indeed why the wounds of Christ are such effective symbols. Like the dynamic tension of the yin/yang symbol, the wounds of Christ represent the place between – the moment of transformation. More contemporarily, Octavia Butler’s Earthseed faith statement speaks directly to this:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
Equally sensuous and made with the same textural dynamism, but less centered around the body, are the sculptural works presented. Particularly memorable are two pieces carved from bars of soap and two carved from blocks of wood. The two made from soap depict sofas, which seem to be rising away from the block of material they are carved from, detached from gravity and the laws of physics. They are sturdily carved but elementally delicate, the gestures of the sofas floating harmoniously with the material whose telos is to dissolve miraculously from a solid into bubbles, transforming things from dirty to clean.
The two sculptures made from blocks of wood represent furniture again, this time chairs. Unlike the pieces carved from soap, the chairs are stably seated, all four legs growing out of the un-carved base of the block. But they too have been subjected to the forces of change. The support on one of the chairs has been carefully chipped away and is on the cusp of breaking. The other, all the more substantially formed, has been blasted with fire and is scorched, accentuating all of the chisel cuts made into the wood. And though wood as a material can last for centuries, those of us who live in Matt Offenbacher’s green gothic world of the Pacific Northwest, wood is a material that rots and decays and blends itself back into life and rebirth.
Trung’s work, overall, is surprising, not despite its tranquility, but because each work is able to so effectively evoke tranquility in tandem with the forces of change. This combination is the crux of Trung’s work, which is so beautifully meditative not because it creates an experience separate from the slings and arrows of life, but rather because it incorporates the pleasures and pains of life into the tranquility.