ORGANIC MINIMALISM: New Bodies of Knowledge October 4, 2009

Featuring artists Ed Bamiling, Ying-Yueh Chuang, Jen Rae, Matthew Walker, Shima Iuchi, Paul Jackson, and Charles Stankievech.

Opening reception: Sunday, October 4, from 1 to 3 p.m.

The exhibition Organic Minimalism: New Bodies of Knowledge brings together seven compelling artistic voices from across Canada in a show that challenges how we observe, think about and re-create the “natural.”

Artists include Ed Bamiling, Ying-Yueh Chuang, Jen Rae, Matthew Walker, Shima Iuchi, Paul Jackson, and Charles Stankievech.
How is the natural object perceived? What is the nature of the thing?
While the formal language of Minimalism originated through industrial processes, the world of machines and technology, Organic Minimalism: New Bodies of Knowledge presents a 21st-century minimalist aesthetic grounded in objects and phenomena that can be found or are produced in nature. In the exhibition, cycles, seriality and time are used as formal tropes in works ranging from sculpture, installation and drawing, to video and photography. The artists strategically re-focus our attention on the way humans construct versions of nature to perform culture upon it and in order to create narratives about transience, decay, becoming, violence, growth, loss, and the emergence of beauty.

Jan Troost, redacting Michael Fried’s famous 1967 essay on Minimalism, “Art and Objecthood,” writes, “Minimal Art necessarily includes the beholder. It is large, confronting and creates a distance and space that includes the beholder as a public… Its human size, inspiration in people and nature, betray it as anthropomorphic, biomorphic. Its nature is theatrical.”
The imperative of the show is inscribed by the drama of the natural in our historical moment. The patterns of exchange between the human and the natural world are not only of deep importance to understand and visualize, but also remain an enduring mystery.

For the exhibition Charles Stankievech will install Gravity’s Rainbow, a work created during a recent residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, near Cape Canaveral. The work produces “slight chromatic shifts and interference patterns” by bouncing a thin slice of white light across a pair of turntables to create oscillating gradations of color and reflections that look like luminescent rings taken out of Saturn’s gravitational field. Specific vinyl records will be chosen in response to the city of LA where Thomas Pynchon wrote the novel whose titular reference is used to collapse time and space around Stankievech’s work.

Shima Iuchi is planning an original large-scale installation in the middle of the gallery, a pair of topographical hanging curtains that mimic the coastlines of North American and her native Japan. Her interest in coastal landscapes and ecosystems extends from early memories of trips to ancient whaling villages through to recent research off the coast of British Columbia where she learned to identify Orca whale calls. Thus, exploring the relationship between the coasts has also led her to make parallels between human travel, mapping, memory, and a sense of place, with the experiences of the largest sea creatures. Critic Bettina Matzkuhnty has noted, “Iuchi’s ability to synthesize disparate influences is exhilarating, as we course down a valley’s physical and human history.”

Jen Rae’s biomorphic drawings of tree burls, in white pencil crayon on tar paper, are at a scale that echoes the human body. Rae’s investigation of materials has taken her between the industrial and the domestic; around the time these works were made she was also exploring reversal, absence and erasure. The burl is a site of conflict and resolution for a tree, where some stress or impurity is integrated into the tree’s structure. “After spending three years working in a hospital directly with patients,” says Rae of a residency she did at The University of Alberta Hospital, “I observed various states of human vulnerability and resilience. This experience engaged me to investigate themes of fragility, intimacy, and ephemerality.”

Ed Bamiling uses the plasticity afforded by ceramics to link geologic time to human and artistic process. He is inspired by clay’s “ability to act as historical document,” to record marks and the passage of time, the way erosion and weathering act as drawings on earth. In two large wall-works, Cloud Tablets and Horizons, he explores “the natural rhythms of everyday life – the ephemeral movement of clouds, the inexorable power of water and waves, the daily arrival and departure of light – and their affects on us, whether or not we’re aware of them.” He is also keenly interested in the influence of the natural environment on human culture – and conversely, the impact of human activity on that environment.

Matthew Walker explores issues in landscape, memory and narrative. He works in the tradition of making material metaphors. He will premiere a new work in Los Angeles, a ceramic sculpture 3-foot in diameter with nautical and paleontological references modeled on a Pleistocene-era Glyptodon shell. Walker merges an archaeological search through the fossil record with storytelling, specifically the aboriginal creation myth of the world sitting on the back of a turtle. He presents an open question about how we ascertain truth when the search for it remains endless and elusive. The sculptural “buoy” marks not a location in the landscape where certainty may be found, but rather tethers this exhibition space to other sites where the piece will travel – all potential places in time where discourse about the nature of truth may take place.

Ying-Yueh Chuang makes hybrid forms out of intensely colored and textured ceramic that are inspired by both organic and non-natural sources. Her work references symmetry and pattern-making that occur within nature. She makes close observation of plant life, but also the aesthetically pleasing arrangement of vegetables in the grocery store, where she says the environment best highlights their inherent structural patterns. Chuang combines individual pieces to make units, or building blocks, that can then multiply to form larger and more complex patterns, expanding exponentially. By the time they reach installation on the floor or wall, her work is not only a controlled explosion of color and texture like you might find in a sea anemone or an exotic flower, it also starts to look like a higher order of math.

Paul Jackson responds specifically to the environment of the Southern California and Mexico with photographic works and video shot in the Imperial Dunes and a tourist resort in Oaxaca, both of which oscillate between document and fantasy. In the video, the cones of two headlights sweep across the barren sandscape (remember that not far away, searchlights comb the US-Mexico border). In the Mexican resort, the presence of the untamed landscape imprisons the manufactured-natural setting for tourists with huge foreboding cacti standing like sentries. Accompanying sculptural works play upon the same themes of latent or potential violence. Cast bronze 2 x 4’s monumentalize the way that tame construction materials, when broken across the grain, resemble the majesty and trauma of a tree in the forest snapped off by the only force capable of true devastation: nature.

"Organic Minimalism: New Bodies of Knowledge" has been made possible in part by The Canada Council and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.