...

Takuya Ikezaki

Magnus Maxine

Emi Mizukami

Lynne Woods Turner

Yui Yaegashi

Newspaper, packages, junk mail—commonplace paper shreds, torn-out soundbytes of pop culture, of zealous solicitation, of urgency. These papers litter catchall countertops and tumble, aimless and crumpled, toward bodies of water. Same for the advertisements—fliers and stickers feverishly promising us some other option, something better, faster.

Papers like these are nothing if not culturally threadbare, so banal we hardly take notice. But the discarded newspaper, the bitten-open plastic package, and the desperate font of commercial proposition are rife with information. These parchments are disposable harbingers, jammed with incitement and deliberation, strewn with promises and threats alike, delineating what is ours and what is meant for somebody down the street.

In the artist's hands, these fibers of documentation are rendered afresh, pulped and congealed into new forms altogether. The materials themselves are ribboned with scraps of everydayness and human longevity—its atrocity and mania, its steady volatility. Churned free of journalistic hyperbole, shed of commercial context and wrested from specific history, paper becomes a surface from which further meaning can be combed. Information is absorbed and digested; images are wrought from the dissolution.

The works herein are records of such endeavors, information splayed and rearranged, reconfiguring the relations between time and location, past and present. Takuya Ikezaki paints directly onto packages and junk mail addressed and delivered to himself, substantiating the psychic and geographical chasms between sender and recipient. Magnus Maxine paints atop the pulpy terrain of newspapers, employing grids of color as a departure from factual knowingness into a willful composting of articulation.

Yui Yaegashi utilizes a systematic methodology in her paintings, eschewing any readily recognizable forms in service of centering the works' formulaic means of production. Yaegashi paints in horizontal and vertical marks, avoiding curvilinear forms that might indicate a figure. Lynne Woods Turner's delicate abstractions investigate symmetric and asymmetric balance, mathematical pattern and sequence, while also responding to the eccentricities of old paper and notation's visual conventions; she takes cues from their globular contours—maps, architectural diagrams, and scientific renderings. Emi Mizukami tucks mythological figures and personal symbology amidst furls of thick acrylic and desert sand, spilling over to the backside of the panel itself—each decision a nod to the passage of time.

The resulting selection is a study in the crushing and re-pixelation of information, the task of processing one's surroundings, of codifying one's reality. The works are the cud of absorption and gestation, the byproducts of grappling with space and time—and one's place among the currents.

—Natalie Power