June7th-July 20th 2008

TERESA COLE

“Often Pattern is so familiar as to work subliminally, a kind of visual background music. Sometimes unpredictably it claims our full attention.”

There are two series of prints presented in this exhibition. They both explore pattern but in diverse ways. Pattern prevails; in fact when I went looking for it, I found ornamentation everywhere especially when my quest led me to India.

The first entitled the Flourish Series plays with pattern and ornamentation at its most decorative. The main character is an 18th Century flourish element that is dissected, splayed open, distorted, and obscured: by other patterns, by contemporary colors, and by shifts in registrations. The distortion is crucial because it adds complexity and contemporarility. The different context of this ornament adds insight not only into the past but also provides current meaning to the form. This series draws from my travels to the east not so much in imagery but through colors and the prevalence of pattern found often in the most unlikely places. Each unique work is relief printed from hand carved plates with numerous inkings and runs through the press.

The second series, the Mandalas, were created specifically from the experience of travel and the visual collecting that I did while encountering a new place, a new culture. A mandala could simply be viewed as a plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically. It is a meditative manifestation of a microcosm of the Universe, the creation of which is practiced in both Hindu and Buddist religions. These works loosely follow the pattern of a Mandala by the nature of the way the images are repeated and conceptually include a microcosm of small Universes ultimately invoking a narrative. These extremely limited editioned prints were screen printed by myself at the Frans Masereel Graphics Center in Kasterlee, Belgium.

Through our multivalent culture my search has been to sift, refine and restructure pattern as an intent to comment on the complexity of contemporary existence.

—Teresa Cole June 2008

JOHN WESTMARK

This new work explores the metaphorical relationship between seemingly disparate ideas and materials. Industrial paper sewing patterns are the architecture for new interpretations outside of their usual, functional context – applied to the canvas, the patterns represent metaphysical images and mythological narratives.

A garment is realised only through the assembly of individual parts from sewing patterns; likewise, myths and history are a kind of panoramic fabric intricately woven with layers of different threads of human lives. By proxy, myth/storymaking/artmaking are of a piece with humankind’s continual efforts to explain our lives and relationships.

KATHLEEN LOE

Anticipation is the most erotic of emotions. The work in this exhibition lives in the unfolding, charged time of new forces gathering. Three distinctly different media portray moments of beauty enhanced by the suggestion of danger or loss.

Peter Pan's Shadows, V and VI . The material here is screen: (noun and verb)

1. anything that serves to conceal, divide, separate, or provide shelter

2. the movie industry

3. something that prevents somebody from understanding his or her real feelings

These extraordinary military helicopters, like women, are designed for fluid transition-rescue to ruin-- and are powerfully beautiful and versatile-- capable of performing as an element in a large community or singularly as a deep ops surveillance machine. In the story, Peter Pan loses his ability to fly without his shadow-Wendy and Tinkerbell facilitate finding and restoring Peter's shadow, his power.

Both marsh pieces were captured photographically and altered slowly by hand, reversing the relative sense of time involved in these land masses forming over eons while being destroyed in a few decades. They are placed in the filmic 16:9 format to suggest that what you see is only one frame of a larger narrative.

In The Devil Beating His Wife, Bayou Baptiste Collette a ravishing sun shower illuminates the morning marsh beyond its normal appearance, reminding us that we are capable of moments of great insight within the everydayness of our lives. This heightened awareness, like the colors of the pixels from the marsh, comes from within.

The muted TV light in Counter Clockwise sets a nighttime stage for winds gathering forces over water. The painted pixels move slowly from lower left to upper right and counter clockwise around the piece. This abstracted storm is visually separated from the marsh by the surface grid, indicating a distance from the marsh, a formal device to enhance the sense of unfolding real time.

Below Venice refers both to Venice, Italy and Venice Louisiana, an area where the Gulf of Mexico meets the Mississippi River. Both places are sinking, both have been victim to disastrous political corruption and remain powerful, even enchanted locations. Animation with sound provides an opportunity to bring together the themes from the marshes, the helicopters, and the modular abstractions, creating a poetic narrative of appearance and disappearance.