Stirring Still

Samuel T. Adams

Gina Beavers

Amy Bennett

Matthew Buckingham

Jessica Dickinson

Lois Dodd

Josephine Halvorson

Corin Hewitt

Elizabeth Jaeger

Claudio Nolasco

John Walker

Curated by Ioana Manolache and Maria Stabio

It’s a given that the creative process is unique to each artist. In her book, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, the author Ann Patchett compares her process of writing fiction to killing a butterfly and embossing its essence onto a page. The final piece never quite becomes what her imagination aspires to. For her, writing is an act of violence. Stories are freshly killed, not born.

If there is anything to be learned from contemporary art, it is that Art is the stuff of fiction. It begins in the intangible imagination of the artist and materializes during the murder of its ideal vision. Artists are murderers and the lucky ones can even make a killing.

If that's true, what is to be said of those who continue to make art beginning with "the real"? The ones working "from representation" or "from life"? I could continue to make puns, but I won't beat a dead horse.

Will these artists be reconciled now, when the stories of life are no longer at a premium? The criticism of representational work is familiar and exhausted. Representation is the stuff of deceit. Born from the interpretation of the subjective, it's an indirect message that shouldn't be trusted. It’s too personal, too unrelatable, myopic even. Just get to the point already. What's with all these layers in between? Emotions become deadened. Images just always continuously fail to meet our expectations.

Let's get back to the point. Maybe for some this endeavor will always be old and tired. But if our stories actually take form in their death, then we're just getting started. Representation isn’t often perceived to have the freshness that contemporary art is always chasing. But that is exactly where these artists are starting. It's the end that is the beginning.

-Maria Stabio, April 2015

What resides in the place in between the image and the material?

An unsettled space where the opportunity for manipulation, transformation and transgression is ever present. A jump of belief is necessary in entering the content of imagery, but the murmur of its materiality is constantly obstructing the attempt to only engage with ideas. These works unravel both in time and in space, in tandem, ever evolving and never settling still before our eyes, well past their

completion.

The medium – be it paint, clay, film, or graphite – becomes the metronome of the image and vice versa, so that they continuously

reanimate each other over time. Medium materiality keeps a physical track of one’s process towards an image, and allows the audience to physically experience this unsettled space.

Millimeters of thick oil paint in Josephine Halvorson’s head stone paintings trace the physical as well as psychological weight of a rectangle engraved by time, text and a buried body. Lois Dodd’s freshly laid down brush marks evoke the ephemeral moments of daily life, settled quietly into formal still lifes. The one-inch reliefs of accumulated paint in Gina Beavers’ paintings explore the political implications of pigment and imagery in a time when social media and the proliferation of images have become a seemingly mundane routine.

Runny paint seeps through the canvas to settle into fragments of notational graphics in Samuel T. Adams’s work, investigating the verso and recto of a structure and its image. Jessica Dickinson’s drawings trace the topographic surface of her paintings with graphite through their many stages, creating ghostly remainders of a concrete realism.

The settling of clay to the touch of a hand – as seen in Elizabeth Jaeger’s sinewy vessels – embodies an apprehended shapeliness, originating in and offered towards the gaze of their viewer. Corin Hewitt’s shallow yet dense objects employ illusion just as much as grit, conveying a cosmetic materiality.

In Matthew Buckingham’s piece, a film projector reveals a detail of Velázquez's 1659 portrait of the young Prince of Asturias onto a painting crate and conveys multiple meanings from the elusive attempt at ‘likeness’ of portraiture painting. Scraps of plastic come together in Amy Bennett’s miniature still lifes, to create nuanced environments and explore charged narratives such as the development of landscape and family.

Claudio Nolasco traces his personal relationship to a space through subjective documentary black and white photography, where the foliage is reminiscent of metal. And John Walker lays down paint unapologetically on found bingo cards, dividing and establishing repetition within pictorial space and landscape.

Representing an image, an idea, and material, these are artists that are thriving in the in between.

-Ioana Manolache, April 2015