Rebecca Ward, Shiver installation shot
Two reasons I am looking forward to Information Is Incidental, the collaborative exhibition of Kansas City’s Emily Sall and Austin’s Rebecca Ward at Paragraph Gallery in KC :
1. It looks like it’s going to be super visually stimulating— a night of stripes, bands, zig-zags, bends, criss-crossing, depth, flatness. We’re getting individual works from both artists—-paintings by Sall and an installation from Ward—and a collaborative installation by the two artists exploring common ideas of new, old and renewed spaces.
2. This idea of synchronicity is really interesting. The two artists apparently didn’t know each other at all before this process got started. The project was set up by a local curator who saw some affinity between Ward’s and Sall’s work. Both artists agreed lay ego aside and take a risk here.
Rebecca Ward, vector drawings
I asked the two artists how they were preparing for the project.
Rebecca Ward: “In preparing for the show I’ve ordered 183 rolls of tape, made a bunch of vector renderings of the space, emailed back and forth with Emily, played around with isometric graph paper, and rearranged color palettes. I’ve also been drinking lots of tea, wearing my boots, frequenting swimming holes, and I carry my journal with me wherever I go just in case I get any new ideas. That’s pretty much it. I’m super psyched about the show, I can’t wait to meet people in Kansas City and make some art there.”
Emily Sall, detail of painting
From Emily Sall: “Rebecca Ward and I have been corresponding with each though email over the past several months, so in a sense our collaboration has already begun. Our conversations have centered around our ideas and process…and what we are looking to achieve with the collaboration. We are both interested in the idea that our works come together in such a way that is reactive, not only in terms of how we will respond individually to the space and architectural elements of the gallery, but also how our works will respond to each other. We have been sending sketches back and forth, but nothing is set in stone! I think the real magic will happen once we are in the Gallery together and yes the intuitive process will be a big part of how the piece will finally come together.”
Emily Sall, Betwixt and Between
I also asked Sall about her project for the Mo Bank Billboard initiative, which places work by artists on a billboard in Kansas City’s Crossroads District: “The Mo. Bank billboard was created by taking an existing drawing and tracing it in illustrator. From there I was able keep the elements that I like and change a great deal of it. I was thinking about ever changing cityscape’s especially in terms of our city and the great change to the landscape downtown. The drawing reveals it’s history through it’s layers old and new and suggests movement and a playfulness and speaks to the idea of the recycled! The title of the piece “Betwixt and Between” is an English idiom meaning-In an intermediate position; neither wholly one thing nor another.”
this looks freaking sweet
OK, wondering if i can get a discussion going here…
why is it that, all things being equal, we often find angles, zip-lined vectored forms and elements, eye-leading formal dynamics, sharp shapes evincing chromatic variance, etc, etc, etc?
is it evolutionary psychology at play – i.e. sharp, speedy, eye-gripping events in the visual field were necessary for the survival of the species? or is it a result of the innate geometry attending the actual physical construction of our visual cortex, which is often expressed in the geometric patterning of migraine headaches and hallucinations of all sorts?
these two are biologically based; could it be normative instead? a learned, conditioned response? i find myself tremendously drawn to work such as what’s presented above, as well as previous MWC features like sarah oppenheimer’s work – is this because of some characteristic of my education? why is it that i love emily sall’s work but am not as interested in tim bavington’s? is the angle the thing that makes it for me?
thoughts from you all?
oops… initial question should read thus:
“why is it that – all things being equal – we often find angles, zip-lined vectored forms and elements, eye-leading formal dynamics, sharp shapes evincing chromatic variance (etc, etc, etc) interesting?”
migraines…I’ve suffered from migraines most of my life. It’s not pretty.
for added consideration:
http://migraine.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/patterns/
One suggestion: All 3 artists you mention responding to (Sall, Ward and Oppenheimer) share an interest in space. In transforming space. There’s geometry, but also spaces present that are engaging and organic.
That may be more of a footnote to the original question than an answer to it. But maybe that will help provoke the discussion.
That piece on the migraine is fascinating. The question it asks, “how deeply is perception linked to geometry and pattern?” (or even human consciousness to to awareness of geometry?) really begs the follow up, “and if so, why?” Is there any kind of natural selection explanation for why people respond to pattern and geometry? Should there be?
In terms of art, my experience tells me that geometry provides a satisfactory experience only in combination with some other element. I can’t imagine taking figure and narrative away from Giotto and finding a satisfactory experience. I can’t imagine taking the obsessiveness out of the Ahlambra. I can’t take the spatial play out of Al Held (or Emily Sall or Rebecca Ward). On the other hand, I can’t deny the power of geometry and pattern as part of the success of those artists’ work.
Pattern is like half a protein. I need to balance those amino acids.
“and if so, why?”
i think it has something to do with the bilateral geometry of our visual system on the one hand, and the ways our brain literally learns how to see using these primary and secondary visual cortex areas as they develop. see these two articles about this:
Pattern formation in the developing visual cortex
Symmetry activates extrastriate visual cortex in human and nonhuman primates
the first article deals with how symmetry in the developing brain is created by the activity of seeing. the second deals with what seeing symmetry and pattern does to the secondary (extrastriate) visual cortex. the extrastriate cortex is (from what i understand) the background level of visual information. it helps us identify generalities like form/mass, color, and motion. this article suggests that the presence of symmetry in the environment stimulates the extrastriate cortex, which might offer reasons why abstract, geometric, linear, angular, and chromatically intense work is often interesting to people. it’s not just “modern art” it’s physical reality, baby.
it really seems to me that the physical structure of the brain’s seeing mechanism influences the kind of fundamental geometry we’re interested in.
obviously making a lot of generalizations here, but it’s really interesting…
a few more artists i dig who are working with this stuff:
sharon butler.
jason rohlf…this one is kinda nice
also linnea spransy’s stuff we’ve seen here at MWC is awesome as well.
part of the reason i’ve been obsessively thinking about all of this is my recent series of non-pictorial works…
Man, I had sort of a quirky figure-narrative painter cued up to go for tomorrow but now I’m sort of keyed up about this geometry thing. I’ve got a couple more pattern/design/geometry types I’ve been thinking about. Maybe I’ll do a two-fer or even three-fer tomorrow morning to keep this topic rolling.
Be nice if more folks got involved…
I’ve been a fan of Jason Rohlf for a few years now…
just to add more to the links…
ms. butler highlighted geoform on her great blog a few days ago.
one of my favorite artists on the geoform site is mark wilson.
speaking for myself, I find sharp shapes unpleasant, especially when that’s all there is in a work. “Sharp, speedy, eye-gripping events” will catch my eye, but not necessarily hold it. Pattern, on the other hand, as in Rohlf’s work, can weave the sharp shapes into something more complex and satisfying. I agree that pattern by itself can sometimes seem lifeless (e.g. wallpaper) but other times ( great carpets) really compelling.
One thought about the attractiveness of symmetry is that it is often a characteristic of living systems. Christopher Alexander, the architect who wrote ” A Pattern Language” has interesting things to say about symmetries. His life’s work has been a search for the structural characteristics that cause what he calls “life” (in buildings, in nature, in art, in cities, etc.). In his book ” the Phenomenon of Life” he sets out what he believes are 15 essential properties An exerpt is here:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GER/is_2001_Winter/ai_81790169/
It’s really worth looking at the book, if you can find it, where he sets out these pairs of photographs.
i kind of think it simply has to do with the way in which optics trips us into perceptual experience without dictating to us exactly the ‘aboutness’ of that perceptual experience.
sort of the same way people who write poetry can be fascinated by the interaction of words because of the sound based experiences they conjure without necessarily assuming that they mandate particular meaning. words are an experience even when they serve to undo the expectations they normally mediate.
so, with something such as geometry or or linear repetition, the same sort of sense principles are engaged without the experience being bogged down by didactic meaning.
for instance, in many of these, the visual events become spatial by necessity. i am forced to traverse the length of a line, or to make the jump from one passage to the next across a visual expanse. the temporality becomes invested because of the visual distance that it requires i engage with it as though an actual distance demanding me to move across and through it. therefore, big questions that normally have no visual correlative, are put in play as experiential problems.
hence the title probably…which i am just noticing…’information is incidental’.
duh. (directed at me, not at you guys)
A couple weeks later, I’m thinking about this work differently. My 22-month old has hit a stage where repetition, loosely ordered systems and pattern recognition has become really important to him. And his growing understanding of these concepts seems to be as joyful to him as it is a necessary. I’ve been thinking about this work, Sall’s and Ward’s, in these terms: the childlike joy of intuiting pattern—like: this stripe is this long, so the next should be this much longer and the next this much longer; then the next set of stripes will run at a different angle, etc. etc. And, also goes back to that biological side of the response to geometry in art.