Morphatoreum
November 16 - January 13
Artist Talk: Thursday, January 4, 6pm
Featured Artists
Featured
About the Show
I think the universe is pure geometry - basically, a beautiful shape twisting around and dancing over space-time.
~ Antony Garrett Lisi
Morphatoreum places Sondra Bogdonoff’s weavings in conversation with Roy Fox’s mixed media Brushstroke series and Jamie Johnston’s painted wood sculptures to mesmerizing effect.
The fascination lies partly in the way the simple and repetitive geometric forms in each body of work seem to morph or transmute when presented in different media, dimensions, and orientations. And partly in the “meta” effect of being immersed in an environment where similar and related visual phenomena are occurring at both a micro scale (within each piece) and a macro scale (in the exhibition as a whole).
Each repeated two-dimensional form in Fox’s deceptively minimalist paintings derives from a singular gesture. In most compositions, all strokes are long, vertical, smooth, and legato. Though, in a few, the strokes are all short, squarish, and staccato. Despite the simplicity of the forms and composition in these paintings, each stroke is a complex little world unto itself, its colors gradient and nuanced. Chemical reactions within the media often morph to an illusion of “not paint,” appearing instead as burnt wood or other materials, organic and inorganic.
The innate physical properties of textiles in Bogdonoff’s objects soften and blur the hard lines of the angular forms seen in Fox and Johnston’s work. Perhaps introducing a sense of temporal ambiguity to the mix: are these forms emerging or receding? Solidifying or dissolving? Like Fox’s brushstrokes, Bogdonoff’s forms appear simple, but in tension with that simplicity is the intricacy of threads that support them — a complex accretion of tiny lines. Bogdonoff’s colors, like Fox’s, are nuanced and gradient, and their forms share a sense of internal fluidity.
Johnston’s bold, joyful wood sculptures quite literally push the repetition of the simple geometric forms at the heart of Fox and Bogdonoff’s work to another dimension: namely, the third. This added dimensionality in conjunction with the effect achieved by rotating forms common to all three bodies of work through space amps up the exhibition’s perceptual intrigue. Johnston’s sculptures seem simultaneously fixed and dynamic. In contrast to the nuance and complexity of Fox and Bogdonoff’s palettes, Johnston’s are limited to decisive swaths of solid, often high-contrast color. The solidity of his color and the material “muscularity” of these pieces enhance the sense of dynamism in their spatial manipulation of form. And thus they, too, feel in “flux.”
Read the review HERE.
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