Works by Dozier Bell, Joy Garnett, Jacqueline Gourevitch, Carrie Yamaoka

Exhibit runs September 14 - November 4, 2008
(Closed President’s Day Weekend)

Reception: Sunday, September 14, 1 – 3:30 PM
Jazz by Jim Clark Duo

Panel Discussion: Sunday, September 14, 3:30 PM
Bell, Gourevitch, Garnett, and Yamaoka, Moderator Deborah Frizzell

ESSAY BY DEBORAH FRIZZELL:

The transcendent and sublime are related as extreme states beyond the limits of ordinary comprehension. “Transcendent” refers to a rare experience or perception outside known boundaries, or a state existing beyond a standard form of being.

To know a boundary is to be aware of what lies beyond it, which is to have already transcended it. “Sublime” describes the quality of vast magnitude to which nothing can be compared, and which lies beyond measurement. Uncontrollable, primal forces of nature are often referred to in terms of the “sublime,” inspiring horror as well as awe. Artists may seek these unbounded states, translating their attendant sensations into visual representation, aiming to express perceptions from the edge of their conceptual capacity, capturing, as painter Joy Garnett has described it, “the feeling of movement when there is none, extending the promise of light, if only one passes swiftly through the closing darkness.”

Closing darkness and an overwhelming enormity of space illuminated by stars and infinite galaxies are themes in Dozier Bell’s large-scale acrylic paintings. Ring (2003) and Rim (2005) offer a temporary release from gravity as we float in their immensity of uninhabited space, a space framed by vastness, dark matter and luminous energies indifferent to eons of time. In Ring, the artist builds up a silky tactility in which a smoky vortex and brilliant light appear and disappear into dark energy. In Rim, the viewer is buoyed up, on the threshold of relativity, simultaneously in and of the universe. Slender white crosshairs and sight lines of paint suggest remote viewing technologies that frame wondrous forces, rendering her omniscient views double-edged. Veil (2007) and Veil 2 (2008) are tiny nuanced charcoals on acetate, illuminating from afar the earth’s murky atmosphere in shadows of fog, drifting clouds, and blurred pools of light. Bell creates rich tonal depth with layers of finely tuned touches of charcoal dust, evoking on this small scale an oncoming eclipse, or the haze of a battle far away in the distance. Beauty and annihilation coexist in her universe.

Joy Garnett paints turbulent and fugitive states with gestural, sumptuously applied brushstrokes of viscous oil paint. Her canvases have a painterly intensity, a sensuality that can explode into apocalyptic drama or nestle in an eerie calm. She often finds her subject in nature, mediated by source photographs culled from Internet-driven news media, which she translates to canvas. She renders her interpretations as layered, associative and resonant. Slurry (2007) and Pink Blaze (2007) grab our attention not only because of their palpable “heat” and terrifying glowing flames, but because we can follow the artist’s path as she moves her brush over, under and into the scene, luxuriating in billows and swirls, and burrowing into a contour defining a blaze or its cooling magma. Garnett employs “the aggressive ambiguity of paint” to blur the boundary between the figurative and abstract, to show the coming-into-being of environmental phenomena, as in Strange Weather (2006) and Pink Sky 2 (2007). Her paintings, made in one sitting, reveal the very act of painting, the conceptual percolation of ideas and implications of meanings, harnessing both the critical and affective potential of art.

The earth’s subtle atmosphere and infinitely changeable weather patterns are the subjects of Jacqueline Gourevitch’s Cloud Paintings. Her paintings have evolved from direct observation and the close scrutiny of a life-long painter who has watched and drawn the intricacies and oscillations that only reveal themselves over time. Duration and change in the passage of time are deeply embedded in her process. Color, light and space are translated from this acuity of perception in flux with shifting patterns of a living environment. Gourevitch captures these fleeting sensations on large swaths of canvas, as in Cloud Painting 142 (1991) and Cloud Painting 102 (1985), as well as on smaller canvases, Cloud Painting 207 (2000), Cloud Painting 186 (1997), Cloud Painting 120 (1985) and Cloud Painting 122 (1991). With no horizon line, scale and distance become relative, and the viewer is left unanchored, up in the air, set free to observe pulses of brilliant blue, tracings of sullen gray, punctuations of light, transparent delicate washes and intermittent revelations of primed canvas. The variation of touch, markings and pigment application, the activity of painting itself, create a sense of movement and vibrant energy. Gourevitch’s artistic process accentuates the temporal nature of our existence, fixing ethereality in paint.

Without explicit markings of touch or brush, Carrie Yamaoka’s complex artistic process compresses time and space. The artist works with urethane resin and sheets of flexible reflective mylar, sometimes mixing in coloring agents such as pigments, liquid tints or alkyd suspensions. When the resin catalyzes and solidifies, it leaves “artifacts” of its changing states, creating undulating forms and reflective surfaces. These remnants of a primal force suggest qualities of painterliness, a facture similar to motions of a brush over the surface of a plane. Reflections appear in a certain light, from a certain angle, as in 12.5 by 10.5 (blue #11) (2007) or 22 by 18 (foggy) (2008); our experience of the work changes depending on our movement, our position and the disposition of light in the room. Yamaoka complicates the distinctions between viewer and object as the work takes on life of its own, reflecting the environment and the viewer, as in 20 by 20 (dust) (2008). Imperfections and controlled accident become active agents. By using phosphorescent pigments, Yamaoka’s 21.75 x 31.75 (2007) extinguishes the border between painting and sculpture, suggesting the eerie, material presence of a living entity. koolpop #25 (2007) ripples with floating silver traces, evoking a photograph emerging in  a darkroom, suspended on the edge of recognition but inchoate. At a seemingly immaterial threshold, it captures moving reflections on the verge of representation – a metaphor for the transcendent and sublime.

Deborah Frizzell, Ph.D., teaches modern and contemporary art history at William Paterson University in New Jersey.

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