IN DIALOGUE | CCA STUDENT EXHIBITION
March 20-25, 2007
Reception: Thursday, March 22, 6-9PM
"Becoming a Professional Artist" class, taught by Michele Pred, featuring new works by:
Adriana Oyarzun, Aly Borst, Amanda McCarthy, Carlos
Saavedra, David Berezin, Deanna Charles, Greg
Kaplowitz, Jade Olsen, Jason Cros, Jeffrey Harland,
Katelyn Sullivan, Laurel Gunnarson, Nicholas Basta,
Sean Donnelly and Zak Timan
Aly Su Borst, "The Big Sleep" C-print
PROJECT SPACE | BILD 20 (Pure Paint) by Jared Lindsay Clark
(through March 25)
Like other "Bild" installations the artist has created, Bild 20 is a collection of found objects transformed into a sculptural painting.
Bild means "picture" in German and connotes phonetically the construction of something architectural or sculptural in English. This
installation describes the level of this dichotomy well, encompassing thousands of hotel soaps and nearly one hundred marble trophy bases.
Each bar of soap, by virtue of its white rectangular surface is an automatic canvas, a pure readymade surface gessoed but not yet painted
on, or like an ideal Minimal object, finished and pure in its reduction of detail (as emphasized in the two "Soap Drawings" on the outer walls).
Despite the strange difference in materials between soap and marble, the two types of small rectangular objects make a new kind of logic
together. While the shapes speak of the relatively recent legacy of Minimal art, the marble offers a direct connection to what was once
considered the highest medium of sculpture since the Renaissance. Glued directly to the wall these objects not only insert themselves
in the site where we expect paintings to be (the white wall of a gallery) but seen in aggregate they form reference to the Modernist grid
painting. This grid is further corrupted by a textual structure lying underneath. In cursive pencil the words "Pure Paint" are mirrored
from the center of the wall (pencil lines still visible near the edges where the soaps begin to separate) and form the template for the
soap/marble grid to follow. While effectively jostling the grid into an unpure version of perfection, the symmetrical design was used to
further confuse the ideals of Modernism and Minimalism by creating a decidedly Baroque pattern of swirling excess. Coupled with the
vertical edge placement of the objects the effect is of a cathedral design or a chapel's organ pipes pointing to heaven, ironically
displacing the transcendental goal of Modernism with that of centuries earlier.
Modernist painting was about being enveloped in an emotional life experience in front of the work. Duchamp criticized such artists as
"olfactory" and "retinal," obsessed with the smell and look of oil paint. Bild 20 pokes fun at both by striving to provide a sublime
experience undercut by ordinary objects and by replacing the scent of oil paint with an almost oppressive sweetness of hotel bathroom scent.
Thus Pure Paint is both and neither. In a way, Bild 20 subverts the very art historical references it pretends to champion. The marble is
not high sculpture like Michelangelo, but dissected bowling trophies. The soap is only pure in its pun as a cleaning agent, its content
is far from pure as multiple references and images will flood any viewer's interpretation.
Jared is an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA. His creative experiments have been featured in the Deitch Projects
Art Parade (2006), New York City, NY and Scope London (2006) with ADA Gallery. He also received a VMFA Fellowship from the Virginia Museum
of Fine Arts Foundation (2006).
See more of Jared's work on the Swarm Gallery artist roster here.
|
