Opening Friday, June 5th, 6–9 pm
Marc Handelman
Daniel Hesidence
Erik Oost
Emilio Perez
Halsey Rodman
Gordon Terry
Britton Tolliver
Jonathan VanDyke
Oliver Warden
Abstract Expressionism cast a long shadow. Standing, as is generally acknowledged, at the pinnacle of American modern art, it loomed large in the psyches of the artists in the movements that immediately followed it—Pop Art, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Process Art, Happenings—even if only as something to react against. In our own moment, when so much contemporary art seems formed from the molds of those successors, Ab Ex still gleams as a distant paragon.
What are we to make, then, of a group of artists who were weaned on Star Trek and Star Wars long before they suckled at the glories of art history? Young men (and it seems to always have been boys who stood in line for hours in 1977 to be the first to see Star Wars, or any of its sequels in later years) who might find in Jackson Pollock’s drips the perfect representation of the flotsam of interstellar space? Who might see in Mark Rothko’s evanescent color blocks a pulsing portal to other dimensions? What are we to make of the work of artists earnestly grappling in various ways with the now sixty-year-old legacy of Ab Ex in order to align it with their own cultural and visual experiences, as well as to figure out the reasons for its continuing hold on our collective imagination?
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye aims to answer some of these questions with the work of nine artists who essay modes of gestural abstraction and equally appear indebted to the tropes of science fiction—Sci-Fi Ab Ex. Titled after a novel by Alan Dean Foster that was commissioned as the sequel to the original Star Wars movie (a commission soon made redundant in the face of George Lucas’s changing plans and the runaway success of his film), the exhibition presents the work of artists who may not constitute a generation or a movement—or even a group—but who share interests in popular culture high and low, and in particular modes of art-making first essayed by the New York School many years ago.
Daniel Hesidence and Erik Oost are, perhaps, the most straightforward painters, each creating spontaneous and expressionist compositions on the surface of the empty canvas. Hesidence’s vaporous fields of brush strokes read simultaneously as gaseous nebulae, internal organs, and otherworldly flowers—at once cosmic and microcosmic. Oost’s recent works also make reference to the natural world, resembling crystalline gardens hanging in indeterminate, fractured space. Emilio Perez, too, paints directly, but with a knife as well as a brush, cutting into and peeling off layers of the surface to draw explosive knots of writhing forms.
Gordon Terry and Oliver Warden take their cues from Pollock, pouring paint onto horizontal supports, but each carefully controls the outcome. Terry creates discrete and psychedelic blobs and splashes, and then transfers them onto glossy black panels, evoking phantasmagoric phenomena in deep space. Warden’s drips animate spectacular composites of found images from sources that include both NASA and computer games. Britton Tolliver also uses pouring as one tool in his arsenal to create trippy images that fuse the organic with the geometric.
Marc Handelman borrows from the corporate advertising of military contractors (the people who brought us “Star Wars” as a missile defense strategy) to make atmospheric and foreboding paintings that beguile with the visual rhetorics of power. Halsey Rodman’s reconstructed, shaped paintings and abjectly futuristic sculptures participate in implied narratives of travel through dimensions of space and time. And Jonthan VanDyke’s installations literally drip paint, over surfaces and through systems that evoke living machines.
