Review

A review of Re-Collections

Caleb Taylor, "Red," oil on canvas, 66" x 72", 2008. Photo: Corey Light

Cocoon Gallery
Kansas City, Missouri
April 2 – 30, 2010

The Arts Incubator invited seven alumni of its artist residency program to participate in a group exhibition that highlights their now more-refined individual strengths. Curator Jennifer Tuttle strived to include equal representation of men and women, while formulating an accessible viewer experience. The work brought forth by the artists' talents crystallized as a cohesive narrative defined by three overt concepts — texture, representation, and abstraction.

There isn't a piece in the room that tugs at your eye with immediate distraction, no piece that competes adversely with the others. But the bombastic color that floods the canvas of Caleb Taylor's Red is hard to miss. Here, Taylor juxtaposes a seizure-inducing tone with a sparse and subtle narrative. No specific imagery is conjured within the frame of the painting, but the stark "cuts" of an alternate reality suggest a heavy case of pilot's red eye may be interrupting the underlying vision, lingering underneath the layer of diversion. Whether it is the construction of greens and blues peeking out from underneath the "red sea," or the shards of this reality super-imposed upon a vast backdrop of rouge remains to be determined. The work is challenging and requires immense concentration and resolve — especially to languish in the ever-so-slight textural adjustments found in the near-unbounded plane of red.

Cory Imig, "Diagrams on Conceptual Art Sentence 10," graphite, 36" x 24", 2010. Photo: Corey Light

"It is difficult to bungle a good idea." This mantra, spoken by Sol Lewitt in 1969, is derived from his Sentences on Conceptual Art. Indeed, it is difficult to bungle a good idea, which may be the reason for Cory Imig's decision to use Lewitt's Sentences as the subject of her installation, Diagrams on Conceptual Art. Diagramming sentences is a tool used by linguists (and many high school and college students around the world) to better understand the mechanics of a statement. First appearing in the mid-19th century and notoriously developed by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, these "tree" diagrams, this method of visually dissecting sentences, is a way to "pull clarity from the chaos." An artist trained in fibers at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Imig is no stranger to process. In this particular exercise, she chooses to refresh both the sentences of study, and the process of diagramming. Armed with graphite and a white wall, Imig unfolds succinct statements into the very visual dimension Lewitt was commenting upon. Structured such, the words mingle with intersecting parallels and dashes to create something reminiscent of a Kansas City bird's-eye view. Tripled together, Diagrams on Conceptual Art: Sentence 10 and Sentence 33 complement each other in a way that city neighborhoods do.

Lori Buntin, "Billboard, No. 10-2," oil on canvas, 60" x 72", 2010. Photo: Corey Light

Imig's imagery is not the only work evocative of city-scape. Lori Buntin's Billboard, No. 10-2 immediately conjures concepts of urban structure. Yet the work is abstract enough to allow the viewer some cerebral wiggle-room — space to wander amongst waning points of perspective and surreal strategies of space construction. The wash of blue is highly complementary to Taylor's piece. Linear strokes are approached in an approximating nature, providing a human element to the formal and canonized structure of the common billboard.

Representation continues with Alexandra Robinson's entries from her Leisure Drawing Series — Leisure Drawing Series: Jan 2-4 2009, Jan 30 - Feb 1 2009, Feb 28 - Mar 1 2009 (attempted suicide) and Apr 3-5 2009. At first glance, the conglomeration of dots in each piece has an uncanny yet mysterious grid-like organization to them, as if some underlying math was manufacturing these productions. However, they remain a sense of humanity through their semblances of randomness. A simple sentence from Robinson reveals the ambiguity that resides on the tip of the viewer's tongue: "This series is based upon police calls in the zip code 94118 (San Francisco) each weekend during year 2009." Implicitly complex and explicitly beautiful, the work jump-starts the mind into a frenzy of what-ifs, how-comes, and whys.

Derrick Breidenthal, "Cut and Run," oil on panel, 36" x 48", 2010. Photo: Corey Light

Questions linger as attention is focused on Derrick Breidenthal's Cut and Run, a painting that seems too weathered to be crafted by anyone but nature herself. The natural environment is unsurprisingly the inspiration for Breidenthal, whose personal intent is to "create a body of work that continually forces me to record, engage, and fixate on the natural environment." Cut and Run is so textural and "antiqued" that it seems to have more in common with the Shroud of Turin than oil paint on panel. It hangs intriguing as it does complex — never forcing any complete image onto the viewer but simply existing as an object to be admired, just as nature would have intended it.

May Tveit, "Expensive," ultralight trupan and industrial acrylic, 51.5" x 45.5" x 5/8", 2009. Photo: Corey Light

In contrast to natural influences, May Tveit's Expensive flies in the face of our biological composition to directly comment upon consumerism, visual representation, and multiculturalism. Immediate and successful, the white speech bubble accomplishes its inherent goal with swift precision.

Lastly, two sculptures, Avoidance #1 and Wishing #5, Time, Sweet Time, by E. Spencer Schubert reside in the middle of the gallery, casting eerie gazes amongst the viewers. Molded in oil-based clay, then silicone, and cast in resin, the pieces are technically astounding but are creepily enhanced by amazingly realistic prosthetic-grade eyeballs that instantly direct and cast attention. Schubert remarks that the sculpture from his Avoidance series is a "comment on all of the many injustices that we each have to avoid every day just to live in our culture.” Linear patterning is found throughout the surface, providing visual and 3-dimensional tactility. The piece from the Wishing series includes a "real" element, the flowers, which Schubert says is a "distraction from the 'object to be viewed' way of seeing art, so that the audience sees the sculptures as people that they can feel for." The artist's vision is executed well; the model figure has definite personality.

Re-Collections is a conceptual show that constructs its message through careful representation and reinterpretation, challenging the audience to use their own creative urges to imagine structure and message not explicitly stated.

-re-

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