Storms Worth Naming
Mapping The Creative Moment curated by Steve Rockwell
KTC AFFILIATED ARTISTS, on view thru December 31, 2023
A map sounds logical, and looks sensible, but it’s a representation for an experience we wish to have, though the real voyage will only resemble the map in terms of stepping over each line in the sand as we come to it. This exhibition tells the story of a trail led past mysterious markers, into unknown territories. It’s an adventure in the creative moment, that cataclysmic or dreamlike interval when meaning emerges from form. Steve Rockwell has chosen six artists to draw their lines, to lead us where they may.
Since Kandinsky first pioneered an abstract sensibility and talked about the spiritual and metaphysical qualities inherent in the making and observing of this new art, these terms have followed it in match step. Yet in his time, despite technological advances of a certain stripe, there was not yet a manner of reaching directly into the beyond that ANNE MARCHAND has achieved. Her paintings, and the subtext from which they are drawn, has its origin in destinations well beyond the capabilities of the unaided human eye, using a Hubble telescope to seek out the organisms and phenomena that reveal themselves at extraordinary distances. Her images resemble what we imagine the world looks like without anything in it but matter, illumination, and other invisible forces like magnetism or gravity. The idea of the cosmic has often been used to dramatize the epic gestures enlivening abstract intentions in art, yet hers are altogether more honest fore relying upon real, if unimaginable non-places in the beyond of beyonds. “Elemental” (2016) is one such work. Consider the images in this canvas as an quantumly larger than several Earths, and consider the dispersion of streams of light as the path of planets, as the reflected sum total of energies expended by possible life forms on those worlds, and the painting opens up as our minds expand to meet it.
STEVE SIMPSON paints not merely for reflexive expression, but to orchestrate the disposition, of worlds. We are presented with figures of mystery, and in their own way, maps of the known universe. These paintings are equally influenced by the disciplines of architecture and photography, as they are by the act of painting; this is to say, that methods by which one portrays a subject, and frames it, are dynamically present here, as well as elements like color, light, and form. Architecture contributes the concept of a complex form that holds objects, as it also holds potential experiences, whether these are imaginary potential events and narratives, or ones with a practical application; photography contributes the sense of transparency, and the precision of details; painting fills out the form, and arranges all of the complexities into a fantastic icon. Tautologically speaking, paintings such as “The Sun and The Moon and The Stars” (2023) and “Reflection” (2022) offer an opportunity to judge a diverse view of human existence. At first one may observe them as discrete organisms—they seem to be biologically animated, given their minimally physiological appearances at least in their given silhouettes; yet within the boundaries of these figures, which function as enclosures or skins. There are worlds within each of them, and in some cases, he presents simplified anamorphic forms inhabiting epic spheres tethered one to another in a dark void. The forms, when depicted solo, both inhabit and fill up his paintings, and are portrayed as both object and actor.
NOLAN PREECE uses experimental methods couched in the merging of photography, printmaking, and painting to create his images. Chemigrams have a long history going back to Pierre Cordier and Gundi Falk but they are little known in contemporary circles. Preece is by far one of the most expressive exemplars of this discipline to which I’ve been exposed. His works cannot be called by any proper noun, but just as ‘works’ for they achieve something so rigorously specific. Preece grounds his achievements in the traditional subject of landscape. His refinement of scenes are so universal they depict places that could only take shape in the mind: deserts, mountains, pine trees, clouds in the sky. In DESERT #1 (2013), the sands of the setting are unruly, not flat as on a beach, but sifting and blowing about, making a three dimensional tide without water. In PINES #1 (2023) two lonely trees inhabit a graying hillside just below the apeak of a majestic mountain. The chemicals look aged, as if to show the erosion and age of a place isolated from historical or personal time.
ERIC SANDERS’ abstractness is culled from identifying the animal energy of the body when played out in gestures created by taking chance, and therefore both discernment and judgement out of the process of self-indemnification. Works such as “Blinding Lights” or “Come A Little Closer” portray the body as abstractly expressive in unintended physicality when falls through the air, as if from a considerable height, or bounced off a trampoline, with various limbs all splayed. Combine such gestures with a formal painterly or cinematic quality that obscures individuality, in either a single color or mass of pigment, and we have amorphous experience with the essential humanity, in both vulnerable and iconic aspects, at its esthetic core.
DELLAMARIE PARRILLI creates enigmatically disparate, emotionally redolent works that use color to move us. Because color animates and identifies every living thinhg in existence, and even objects or places beyond naming, like a copse of clouds floating in the dusky sky, the shimmer behind the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, or the tangle of flowers and roots in deep bushes in parts of a forest that few eyes have ever glimpsed. Parrili invites us to enjoy the reflective nature of hidden meaning in a painting such as “Technicolor Dreams” (2020), and we are joyfully lost.
The paintings and collage works of JOHN KINGERLEE are possessed of an expected frisson, by which this self-styled “maker of surfaces” communicates the pure vision which extended isolation can provide. The works of his on view in this exhibition are either collages or straight painting, though in each case the self-taught aesthetic and workhorse layering of material give them a unique sensibility. Both feel as if they were the product of extremely incremental ideas being applied repetitively and habitually at an almost glacial pace. Mostly abstract, though organized in standard pictorial formats, they create either a theatrical sense of space like a proscenium stage projecting into the center of the image, or a filmic narrative in which successive squares of the visual fold run back and forth like the lines of text in a book. One receives the intimation that Kingerlee is attempting to fill the canvas in a significant fashion, pressing the expansive details of his imagination into a limited visual area. Themes in each of Kingerlee’s paintings tend toward either epic tales of discovery and rebirth or the minutiae and dynamics of long term exposure to a limited community has allowed him to glean. In his collages he often uses, whatever is available to him, like postage stamps, train tickets, labels on bottles of water, or pages from his favorite Trollope novel when he was a child. Kingerlee has a unique perspective, seeing the world as a garden to be cultivated, as a symbol if the harmony inherent in all things, and so the structure of his works reveal the structures of the unconscious mind. A work such as “Neighbors” presents a field of perspective, like one seen out the kitchen window, and yet perceiving the surrounding houses, roads, and other people like brooding statues carrying the weight of their unspoken presence.
The artists featured in this exhibition have perhaps never been mapped before. They are each practitioners of an expressive intensity that operates beyond expectation. Each presents a unique fingerprint with idiosyncratic forms following internal struggles rather than market trends. Mapping is the imprimatur of an ardent desire, the same that has motivated explorers to first circumnavigate the globe, plumb the depths of oceans, or immerse themselves into classifications of things yet unnamed. Rockwell follows in the steps of the artists themselves, each of whom walks a personal path to knowledge through color, form, matter, and meaning. Any map constructed between the points that each represent necessarily leads one into ferments and thickets of rough magic. Like storms, they do not stand still. Each are storms worth naming.