The six artists in curator Shannon Anderson’s KWAG exhibition share an interest in elucidating the imperceptible and the inconceivable, in “creating their own language as they explore the forces of time, space and logic that affect our everyday lives.” Geometric shapes, the shape of sound, voids and infinities populate an exhibition rich with both playful and serious explorations of our methodologies for making sense of the universe.

Joseph Albers told Elaine de Kooning in 1950 that “the concern of the artist is with the discrepancy between physical fact and psychological effect.” Jessica Eaton explores Alber’s notion (and some of the revolutionary ideas on color theory from his 1963 classic Interaction with Color) and combines them with Sol Lewitt’s exploration of the cube. In the five large format photographs in the exhibition, Eaton enacts a series of Photoshop-like manipulations, all performed in-camera. The artist documents a set of cubes that are painted white, black and grey. Using multiple exposures, the color hues in each image have been made by exposing the film to additive primaries of red, green and blue. What is most striking about the work is the unexpected painterly quality of the images, which was the result of hand-painting the cubes, leaving visible brush strokes. Eaton’s analogue approach to photography reaches beyond an academic technical exercise with results that are strikingly beautiful and expertly nuanced.

Sound artist Marla Hlady’s work often interprets sound as a physical phenomenon. Here she presents two of her Soundball works—stainless steel rice balls containing LED lights and audio loops that the audience activate. The exhibition also includes excerpts from her series of intricate, meditative drawings, which represent sound from an expressive, poetic perspective, using delicately drawn arrows on graph paper to delineate sound as intuitive graphic score.

Two works by Karilee Fuglem explore the relationship between the celestial body and the human body. Magnified photographs of the artist’s back are inverted as color negatives, the landscape of her skin resembling a spacescape, dotted with stars. A companion piece, Somewhere Behind My Heart, transposes these patterns of pores and moles onto an actual astral map, and plots them out on a web-like structure of hand-woven monofilament resembling an intricate but overgrown spider-web. The installation, anchored to the floor with a series of weights, disappears into the shadows, further suggesting its theoretical nature, imbuing the work as the artist says, “with an element of daydream…as part of its architecture.”

A messier approach to mapping, somewhat at odds with the otherwise subtle, minimal and sometimes delicate accompanying pieces in the show, is Richard Sewell’s Wherelocal/circling. The site-specific work, comprised mainly of hardware store materials, such as corrugated plastic, a large tarpaulin, cable ties, etc., explores how we locate objects in the world through both intuition and logic.

Charles Stankievech’s Gravity’s Rainbow turns Pink Floyd’s 1973 record Dark Side of the Moon into its own lightshow by projecting a thin beam across the vinyl grooves, creating an iridescent reflection reminiscent of Saturn’s rings. The soundtrack to the installation consists of the turntable stylus stuck in the run-out groove of the vinyl disc, repeating an endless white noise, not unlike the residual radiation from the Big Bang.

Adam David Brown’s White Noise is a 30 x 40 inch frame containing multiple layers of white paper, from which the artist has cut concentric ellipses creating a layered spiraling vortex that might also read as the numeral zero.   Next to it, Eclipse invokes Joseph Beuys’ blackboards, with its patina of classroom use, except for a pristine erased black circle in the center, suggestive of a black hole. The surrounding dense layer of chalk scrawlings are equations and formulas by Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, and Albert Einstein.

Einstein’s remark that, “the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible” fittingly embodies the spirit of curiosity and investigative play that runs through all of the work in the show.  Bringing together works that use the human body, cultural artifacts, light, ambient sound, and everyday materials to make connections to the invisible world, Circling the Inverse Square attempts to reconcile the unknowable with the tangible.

By David Dyment

The post Circling the Inverse Square at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

MH: Your work comes across as really photographic in some way. When I first saw a show of yours online, I imagined them to be selectively exposed passages of color photo paper. How did you arrive at using ink in this way?
CC: Your observation is interesting—I build up layers of ink in quite a traditional way, using large brushes and a lot of water. Although not photographic in the literal sense, the process can be linked to a photographic one, the liquid developer slowly revealing shadows on the light-sensitive paper. In fact, the colors change while drying. The more layering, the darker and shinier the surface becomes. It gradually resembles a black mirror, a reflective surface saturated with water. I need to wait for it to be completely dry, and to remove the masks that protect the white part, to see the painting really appear.

MH: Given the compositions you construct, I imagine you get compared to Blinky Palermo quite a bit. Is there a connection there? What artists (if any) do you look to for inspiration?
CC: I have great admiration for Blinky Palermo’s work, of course. My primary intention however does not reside in formal concerns. My work comes out of a stretching of the light, disclosing brightness under veils. The need to construct—to construct liquid—comes as I work;  the search for a structuring device for this unlimited space. I do not look for inspiration outside of the components of the painting. Nevertheless, I could refer to the work of James Turrell, Agnes Martin, Joseph Albers, Claude Monet, Shitao, etc.—in addition to Blinky Palermo.

MH: Who would you choose to show beside you in a two-person museum show?
CC: On Kawara, Fra Angelico…

MH: Some of your lighter color choices are openly vibrant and luminous, while your darker forms seem decadently rich, sometimes almost receding away from the eye indefinitely. What is your inspiration or what do you think about when it comes to choosing a certain color for your next work?
CC: In fact, I do not make color choices prior to the painting. I can have a desire for a certain tonality but the color is not given, it arrives. The color and the shape are intricately connected. A dialogue exists between the initial gesture I make and the surface reaction, which I carefully observe in minute detail. It does not allow for repentir and implies definite choices, in openness to the potentialities of the painting. That is the reason I do not limit myself in terms of chromatic range, from dark to light.

Claire Chesnier, Résonance, installation view, 2013. House of Arts of Beijing, China. Photo Credit: Yge Gou.

MH: Do you see your work as opening up as spatial windows, or is your intent more about compositional decisions suited to a flattened, more analytical representation of space?
CC: My paintings are both an assertion of the surface and a search for a “light depth”. A presentation of a space specific to painting, not a representation. The combination of hard edges and spread colors creates this dual perception of flatness and depth. Depending on their temperature the colors recede or come forward, the whiteness around produces a perceptual oscillation. They can be seen as fragments of extent. As Paul Valery wrote, “Ce qu’il y a de plus profond en l’homme, c’est la peau (what is most profound/deep in man is skin)”

MH: As someone who also works on paper, I enjoy to your decision to hang your work without a frame. Is there something art-historically tired about a frame these days? What is you opinion of frames as a measure to elevate works on paper to a more marketable level as a commodity?
CC: From the beginning, I never wanted to frame my work. Not so much for the art historical concerns you mention but because the question of the frame is at the heart of my preoccupation, in terms of composition. Thus, I do not want to redouble the frame by adding one outside the painting. Furthermore, I wanted to avoid turning the painting into an object. I am aware that this inevitably occurs, but my attempt is to present my work as straightforwardly as possible so that the viewer can enter the materiality, feel the subtle nuances, the presence of the painting itself.

MH: What projects do you have coming up that you are excited to share?
CC: I will have a show in January in the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Val-de-Marne (Mac/Val) where two of my paintings just entered the collection. I am also very pleased to have been awarded two art prices: Foundation François Schneider and Art Collector, which will both result in an exhibition in the Fall 2014, and which will also lead to a catalogue. Until then, I have a project with Galerie du jour agnès b. in Paris and a production residency at the Centre de l’Estampe et du Livre in Lyon.

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