Last week, I dropped by Sundaram Tagore Gallery to see the Ho Sook Kang exhibition. Her paintings are built up with teeny tiny gestures, marks or dabs of colour really, that when viewed as a whole capture and communicate a sense of movement and elemental power.

I wasn’t familiar with the artist before seeing the show, so when I got back to the computer I check out what the gallery had to say. Here’s an excerpt,

If abstract art is the consummate means of communicating what Kandinsky famously called “internal necessity,” then it is a matter of the quality of inward depth in abstraction. In American action painting it means enacting raw feeling, implying that the instincts in which it originates are uncontrollable, while in Kang’s Orientalist action painting it means refining feeling, so that it is brought under ego control and stabilized, and can be aesthetically contemplated, that is, incorporated into the conscious self and used to fertilize its growth and understanding. The goal of Kang’s Orientalist action painting is self-consciousness not self-expression–more particularly, the transformation of self-expression into self-consciousness. If American action painting is informed by avant-garde primitivism–the climactic statement of the “noble savagery” that Gauguin pursued–then Kang’s action painting is informed by the Oriental ideal of meditative calm, holding its own whatever emotional and social storms threaten it. {Read more…}

While the academic in me would argue with certain turns of phrase in this piece and the implications/assumptions of both action painting and the “Oriental ideal of meditative calm,” it did get me thinking about a couple of points of comparison. First, in American gestural painting we often find that the expressive gesture functions as metaphor for an individualistic or atomistic conception of the self. Kang’s paintings seem to point to a different conception of the self, one that is more holistic. In her work, the individual gestures function together as a whole to create a unified abstract image. Second, it got me thinking about the Confucian/Classical Chinese idea of the “Doctrine of the Mean” (chung-yung) and so I pulled out one of my books and Wing-Tsit Chang had this to say which I found interesting.

In the Analects chung-yung, often translated the “Mean,” den;otes moderation but here chung means what is central and yung means what is universal and harmonious. The former refers to human nature, the latter to its relation with the universe. Taken together, it means that there is harmony in human nature and that this harmony underlies our moral being and prevails throughout the univers. In short, man and Nature form a unity. {Read more…}

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Martin Golland / Blue Room / 2008 / oil on canvas / 43 x 36 in / © Martin Golland Courtesy of the Artist and Birch Libralto

Shapeshift
March 15th – April 19th
Opening reception Saturday March 15th 2–5 PM
Birch Libralato
www.birchlibralato.com

‘Shapeshift’ will be Martin Golland’s debut show with Birch Libralato. Golland’s paintings (drawn upon the traditions of Surrealism and Cubism) attempt to create engulfing architectural spaces that evoke sensation, discovery and disorientation. These slipshod spaces, emptied of figures, suggest the residue of nameless ritual activity.

Golland explains that, “My work is built from a collection of gestures and painting languages that respond to the histories of abstraction and representation. [It] depicts overlooked architectural spaces that trigger experiences of the uncanny. The scenes presented in my work are emptied of figures, leaving only traces of hidden activity. My intent is to mark out the slippage between elements of safety and fear that are revealed in these scenarios.

I use a selection of competing modes of painting that function at various degrees of abstraction and representation. I work with a sourced inventory of leftover modernist styles and my own photography as departure points for my painting. I treat the photograph as a departure point for an improvised fiction. As I translate these elements into painting, the materiality of the paint warps representation and asserts its own pictorial logic through competing ranges of gesture, texture and form.

The discreet transitions between the various zones of the painting act as a metaphor for the fractured phenomenon of perception. Bent perspective and idiosyncratic colour work at cross-purposes to one another but provide temporary cohesion. Despite their disjunctive make-up, the engulfing spaces create an occasion for immersive experience. Each work presents a heightened moment – an upsurge of the visible – where the relationship between what is represented and what is seen becomes problematic and the consistency of the world wavers. As a result, the fugitive shifts of space act as a metaphor for the mind’s sway between reverie and dread.”

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TWWOBLCAKSTALLIONSWITHINSAANECOKCSRAMMIINGNAISTYBRUUNETT / ink on paper / 20” x 30” / 2008 / © Courtesy of Ned Snider / www.nedsnider.com

My friend Ned Snider has been working on a series of screen prints based on SPAM e-mails for a while and has just decided he has finished the cycle. As he says about this work

This most recent series of text-based work attempts to serve as a metaphor for the larger context in which spam email exists. This being the relentless and unbiased dissemination of information, which our society is now accustomed to receiving on a daily basis. Unbeknownst to us, much of this information is traveling all around in energy waves organized by our vast telecommunications systems, until they find their proper media terminus.

The visual interpretations within this series are intended to echo this phenomenon of information propagation. Each spam message used was taken verbatim from the original message that found it’s way into my inbox. [Read more...]

What I like about this work is how he has given form to this meat, materialized it out of the ether, sliced it up, transformed it, photographed it, and then dematerialized it back onto the web! See the whole series at nedsnider.com

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