MIND TRACES
JHB Gallery presents an online exclusive exhibition featuring a selection of artists, who through distinct practices, examine concepts of mind tracing as a process of translation and bodily intervention.
Featured artists: Doug Beube, Bohnchang Koo, Ellen Carey, Simone Douglas, Don Freeman, Andrew Hayes, Guy Laramée, Aki Lumi, Amanda Means, Scott Morgan, Nic Nicosia, John Noestheden, Yuki Onodera and Mark Saltz
In his Paperback Portrait series, Doug Beube de-constructs mystery and romance novels to create new identities made from multiple narratives. Beube writes: “The fragility and coloring of the acid paper is evocative of how we might age, unlike some of the characters within the books’ pages. I asked a friend to draw my profile on the cover of the top book. The books fan open and stack on top of one another alluding to a totem pole. The repeating shapes of my profile and the vase are meant to be enigmatic and comical; a flat space becomes dimensional.”
In Bohnchang Koo’s Gold series photographic portraits of cultural artifacts are re-contextualized into new poetic imaginings. Re-examining ideas of cultural transference and beauty– each body of work becomes a series of meditations in space and about the perfection in the imperfection. “For a long time my work has expressed a certain history of living and inanimate things,” says Koo. “Their decay and disappearance: man and his mortality.”
Ellen Carey’s early investigations into the “self” were explored using color, multiple exposures and the large format Polaroid 20 X 24 camera. “These self-portraits are simultaneously me and not me, purposely posed, head and shoulders, to camouflage my gender, acting as a stand-in for the human being — an every-person — color-coded with schemas that suggest a larger backdrop of the cosmos,” says Carey.
Simone Douglas’ Blind series is the culmination of a long-term investigation with the sublime, excess, immateriality and the landscape. Initial bodies of over six hundred images were collated and the final works were made through a process of light staining and analogue processes. The dominant use of “blue” references her research with the desire for perfect knowledge. “Blue is the last color we are able to perceive before blindness,” says Douglas. “These are transient landscapes made in response to a flooded desert, an upended sky.”
Don Freeman’s painterly explorations with hand-toned monochromatic images of still-life, interiors and architecture become poetic dream-like symmetries. “Each image is gracefully altered through the delicate hand-coloring techniques employed to create a rich, dreamscape – a pale and lush palette that recalls a faded remembrance of beauty – simple rhythmic gestures – fragments of time,” remarks Freeman.
Andrew Hayes employs both steel and the book as a material. In the process, he discards any traces of the books identity and re-contextualizes each page into a sculptural industrial form, giving it new meaning. "I am drawn to books for many reasons; however the content of the book does not enter my work," says Hayes. "The pages allow me to achieve a form, surface, and texture that are appealing to me. I take my sensory appreciation for the book as a material and employ the use of metal to create a new form, and hopefully a new story."
Guy Laramée traces the disappearance of the written word and the making of cultures by preserving and cutting directly into discarded books. This particular work Untitled (V), is based on the Irazú Volcano in Costa Rica. Laramée writes: “I have always been attracted to volcanoes maybe because they are like the orifices of the body and a passage between two incompatible worlds–the inside and outside.”
Aki Lumi's Garden series is an amalgam of over three hundred images, combined and transformed into new contexts. Often depicting traditional motifs from religious architecture, these “cathedrals and temples are works designed to contain an eternal temporality,” explains Lumi. “Their mysterious, complex decoration alone concentrates the will to reach beyond time.”
In her most recent series Folded & Crushed, Amanda Means alters the paper’s surface by hand in an extremely labor-intensive process of intricately folding, refolding, cross folding, exposing and developing. “Ever since I began working with photography,” she says, “I became frustrated that I couldn’t get my hands into it. In the traditional approach, you don’t make direct contact with the surface in the way painters and sculptors work.” Entirely made in the darkroom, with light and chemistry, Means manually interacts with the light sensitive paper. As a result, her physical handling of the paper is recorded in each work.
Scott Morgan’s work is primarily concerned with the nature of human consciousness and the science of seeing. In his self-portrait, Morgan combines the celestial with the biological by photographing 10ml of his own blood rendering it atmospheric and multilayered. “This creates a visual bridge from the personal and biological to a more universal, galactic perspective,” says Morgan. “It is at once a portrait of the individual and a portrait of some hidden personal world that touches on the universal.”
Nic Nicosia examines concepts of authenticity and the mode of representation by re-staging artificial moments in time and "believable fictions." “Each piece started with a small-scale model, a space based on the architectural golden ratio. Each one was exactly the same shape and dimensions,” Nicosia says. “Then with objects found in my studio, I would build and add the visual components and eventually work with the lighting for effect.”
John Noestheden’s Diamond Drawing series reference both star formations (light) and the man-made (hubris). Each composition is determined by vibration and random dispersion of the various sized elements on the paper surface. The crystals are further manipulated by controlled interference: frequency and duration of vibration as well as manual interference such as gathering and edging. “In the Diamond Drawings, I’m investigating control, pattern and beauty,” says Noestheden. “The silver crystals reference the patterns found in star formation–or at least in the charts and star maps we humans construct in an attempt to understand and make sense of the universe.”
Yuki Onodera’s The World is Not Small - 1826 series is an assemblage of names or road signs from distinct languages. Creating topographies from cultural signifiers, Onodera’s political staging points to a world that “is not small.” Stuart Munro for the Japan Times writes: “Onodera’s photograph of a room full of signage–of mountain topography, rivers, plant names and people–speaks of the subtle cultural differences that “outsiders” misread, overlook or simply ignore.”
Mark Saltz’s series of paintings refer to “psychological states of being” related to particular times of day, pending weather conditions and seasonal change. By scraping, power sanding, and bodily intervention these works produce distinct color and light variations made through this physical iteration. “These paintings are the product of an ongoing addictive and subtractive process,” says Saltz. “The interaction of layers made of raw pigment ground to various viscosities, reveal underlying color intervals and create complex yet subtle color definition.”
