ABSTRACTOMETRY

FRIST CENTER FOR THE VISUAL ARTS

AbstractometryAugust 30, 2013–February 2, 2014

Conte Community Arts Gallery

Fig. 1

This exhibition includes works by Nashville-area artists that feature geomet-ric patterns, typography, or other graphic codes for cultural factors shaping our lives. The title merges the term “abstract”—a synopsis of a larger idea—with the notion of “metrics”; how we measure and are defined by systems ranging from technology and architecture to language and film. The artists in the exhibition—Alex Blau, Patrick DeGuira, Warren Greene, Ron Lambert, James Perrin, Christopher Roberson, Terry Thacker, and Amelia Winger-Bearskin—have adapted or invented visual languages to function as cryptic shorthand for their perceptions of society.

In Alex Blau’s paintings (cover), precise geometric arrangements in high gloss paint are heir to Pop Art’s silkscreened flatness and Op Art with its mind-skewing pat-terns. They make other cultural references, notably to the radioactive garishness of Japanese anime and eye-catching appeal of certain packaging, gum-wrappers and other such consumer come-ons. Blau devises her patterns with an eye toward music; rhythmic movements and unexpected shifts, harmonies, and dissonances are punctuated with acid-sharp colors. These weirdly sweet and psychedelic icons have the glaring intensity of fireworks or Pop Rocks candy, but their stunning clarity and structural inventiveness causes them to linger in the mind’s eye, hallucinatory icons of artificial culture.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin’s Dance Sequence videos (2011, fig.1) have a similar pop sensibility. Remixed from musicals, cartoons, and nature shows from the 1960s and ’70s, these fractal-like arrangements repeat, shrink, expand, and double-up in a swirl of technology, memory, and dream. Soundtracks adapted from Broadway and pop music provide clues to the identity and meanings hidden in the zanily reconstructed films. Works from Winger-Bearskin’s Abstract Animation series take cues from experimental films of the early twentieth century. Micky Mousing; Movement; and Ducking (2013, fig.2) feature moveable planes and floating lines, illustrating what

the artist imagines pioneer animators would have created if they had had access to

today’s digital technology. The titles refer to film industry words for different ways to sync music to animation.

The traces and imprints of our cultural inheritances, whether in film, music, or, in the collages of Terry Thacker, photocopies, have the capacity to not only define who we are, but also what we have lost. In most of the works in the series Allegory: Petite

Fig. 2

Tigers (2013, fig.3), Thacker uses a second generation print of a roller coaster, which could call forth faded memories of family excursions to the boardwalk. Turned on their sides, these convoluted forms also become abstract gestures evincing vertigo and instability.

Thacker printed these scenes from news images of a New Jersey roller coaster that was bent, twisted, and flooded by Hurricane Sandy. Jagged black shapes hovering over this post-diluvian structure—like compos-ites of bats or the singed wings of demons flitting overhead—cast mortal shadows onto the wreckage. They bring to mind the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s vision of an “angel of histo-ry,” which could personify this or any of the other disasters of our times:

Where a chain of events appears to us, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet…. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.”

Fig. 3

The ephemerality, altered meanings, and suggestions of loss in Thacker’s harbingers of broad collapse relate them to the idea of the palimpsest. This is the term for a surface on which one text has been removed to make way for another, leaving only ghostly ev-idence of ideas, meanings, and images for the forensic linguist or archaeologist to decipher. In Warren Greene’s paintings, the mysterious nature of the palimpsest is recreated through the act of painting. Loose atmospheric forms and rigid gridlines are applied, then scraped and sanded, then

reapplied, until a fine tension between rhythm and improvisation appears. The works’ gravitas and optical pulsation inspire moods of intense contemplation, linking them to the serial music of avant garde composers such as Philip Glass (fig.4).

Greene’s use of the grid is in the spirit of twentieth century artists such as Piet Mon-drian, Agnes Martin, and Carl André, for whom the structure provides a poetic symbol for social progress or cosmic balance. Acknowledging this ideal, Ron Lambert sees the grid as a fundamental aspect of urban existence. But he also uses it to question the

Fig. 4

primacy of hu-man order. In Static (2010, fig.5), gridded squares appear as bits of civilization interspersed between fragments of nature, then disappear from the landscape, then reappear elsewhere. The accompa-nying audio com-prises samples and glitch sounds laid over randomly determined tones, reflecting a dynamic and edgy tension between the two worlds. In a like manner, City Order (2009) reflects the max-imum imposition of an artificial system, with imagery reflecting the increasing density of urban growth, grid stacked upon grid. Its discordant soundtrack is derived from a 1950s film about the benefits of urban renewal, stripping away the old for the new.

Modernist ideals also affected graphic design in the twentieth century. Typefaces were often blocky and sans serif, conveying the value of stripped functionality with no

Fig. 5

need for dramatic flourishes. Yet even neutral typography contains messages. Patrick DeGuira’s Steals Clock. Faces Time (2012, fig.6) has the aplomb of a newspaper headline, which we might read thusly: someone steals a clock, is caught, and faces jail time. But the text has peculiar inner phrases or couplings that might have other, more poetic resonance: “clock/faces,” “steals/time,” also, “clock/time.” A simple cause and effect declaration has now become a semiotic play on ways meanings can

shift relative to word placement. In the pleasure of the game, one may never notice the irony of a person doing time for stealing a clock.

Instead of syncing different mediums, James Perrin combines radically different painting techniques within each work. Many of his paintings feature sinuous lines and electrifying gestures woven together with images of humanity to suggest the elasticity of time, space, and consciousness. In MN-AD11-12 (2012, fig.7), chromatic brilliance and a dense layering of marks make it difficult to tell if it shows a human figure at its center, with arms and legs fully extended. This would not be like Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man (1460), asserting humankind as the measure of all things. Rath-er, it embodies the energy arising from the interaction between entropy (things falling apart) and the gelling of new forms and ideas.

Fig. 6

Perrin’s Walmart (2012, fig.8) paintings similarly cloak the mundane with mystery. Each image is formed of two distinct layers. The primary or under-layer contains palimpsistic glimpses of aisles, sales bins, and floors. Clusters of paint scrapings have been accumulated on the surfaces of these interior views, with a randomness that seems to defy the control of the artist’s hand. This detritus covers Walmart’s fixtures like volcanic debris or exploded consumer goods; the modern Pompeii bringing ca-tastrophe onto itself.

Where as Perrin’s Walmart paintings inspire us to think about the detritus of consum-er culture, Christopher Roberson finds metaphorical significance in aspects of enter-tainment such as sports and cartoons. In both Area (2010) and Wettt (2012, fig.9), he alludes to basketball—the painted edges of Area reminding us of the inbounds lines on a basketball court, and the drooping Wett comprising a hoop and net that have been transformed by gravity into an unusable icon of the sport that is famous for its promise of money and glory—and the never-ending deflation of that promise—held out

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to young athletes everywhere. Roberson finds multiple meanings in the image of the arc. His Smile Variations (2010, fig.10) is a fanciful series of arcs transformed into a group of cartoon like smiles. They may cause us to look differently at Wettt, to see it as both a drooping basketball hoop and a big frown.

The artwork in this exhibition is nothing if not enigmatic. As with much abstraction, the relationships between forms, sources of inspiration, and meanings are personal and not always obvious. While the images are open to interpretation, they each offer the receptive viewer an experience of beauty, humor, and provocation.

Mark Scala, chief curator, Frist Center for the Visual Arts

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Note:

Walter Benjamin, “Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,” ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 1968), p. 257. http://books.google.com/books?id=xXAZGIfhhGUC&pg=PA277&dq=Walter+Benjamin+Illumi-nations+Hannah+Arendt&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Gn3AUdSdJoqm9ASd9YC4Cg&ved=-0CEIQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Illustrations:

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AbstractometryAugust 30, 2013–February 2, 2014

Conte Community Arts Gallery

This exhibition was organized by Mark Scala, chief curator, Frist Center for the Visual Arts.

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts is supported in part by:

DOWNTOWN NASHVILLE919 BROADWAY

NASHVILLE, TN 37203fristcenter.org