Content
Often I am pulled under by the content of a created work, going beyond surface application into a deeper meaning. My mind usually navigates to the why and attempts to dig and sift for a broader understanding of what I am currently viewing. The paintings of Charline von Heyl and Dana Shutz are exemplary in this endeavor, their work draws me down a funnel hole in my attempts at deciphering. Once enticed by surface texture and gesture I am immediately brought into a conversation. Rarely am I one to merely flirt and pass, or perhaps with these two I have no choice, spellbound at first sighting.
It is beneath the surface that I tend to scratch, gnawing at a need for the elixir of meaning. This is an addiction I am willing to succumb to, though perplexed by the constant quandary. Pleased that I am by the formalities of surface, I’m quickly nudged by the question of why: our need to communicate by way of physical making.
“Through process and visual cues content shows itself most meaningful, holding one’s gaze.”
A more than satisfactory answer to why is the work of Peter Lane and Michele Quan. Both are practitioners of form, utility and meaning, profoundly communicating the question of creating and making. Within the evidence of the hand and process, meaning is shown by physical gesture, where the carnal fuses with contemporary visual language by way of kneaded earth. Through process and visual cues content shows itself most meaningful, holding one’s gaze.
Through gesture of making we find meaning and solace well beyond the surface. This I find to be a necessity as we turn another year, another day and moment, saturated with the desire to know resolve. It is with the creative gesture we find our shared voice and even in the distance, our humanity. It is by way of pulling meaning through the gauze of content that life and living comes to focus, where questions are answered as well as unfold.
Review
“The work speaks to mind and body by way of utility, but delves deeper to emotion through creative self expression.”
It is within the realm of the creative intuitive and technical prowess that the work of Stefan Rurak dwells. A dance between sculpture, drawing, painting and furniture. Here, there is a morphing of the rational mind and the curious when engaging these erected forms. The work speaks to mind and body by way of utility, but delves deeper to emotion through creative self expression. With solid form, etched lines and expressive strokes of patination, the Drawn Cube sits firmly in the realm of the expressive utilitarian. A culmination of the left and right hemisphere of the brain, seeped within the passion of an artist.
A Moment of Stay
To map the future is to navigate todays narrative, measuring the distance between deeds done and resolve. The cause and effect of daily actions and words spoken are ripples outward and waves forward, a natural order of living: how we live now and how we soon will live. This is no story book tale but fact in plain sight, though it seems we may have taken a blind’s eye.
“It is at this point a time of doing and inspiring: stacking the logs to build the dam.”
There is no need to go into details of our contemporary challenges (we know them). Our biggest concern should not be what we know, but what we know to do. The facts are there, we cannot go around them any longer, resolve is the paramount knowledge here. It is at this point a time of doing and inspiring: stacking the logs to build the dam.
How we live goes beyond the things we buy, again, we know. Empathy is something that affects our environment as are the materials we use in daily routines. Both are plinths to building a way of life and future. How we feel is equal to how we live within the material world.
“Who we are and where we’re going.”
This is not a plea for minimalism, though I personally find this most appealing. It is however, a bid for a moment of stay, a time to stop and pivot to a clearer and more purposeful way. A milestone of asking harder questions of how we live and how we see the future. A conversation of us and we, life and living and the definition of humanity. Who we are and where we’re going.
Passion
To know and to believe are two different processes, one is based on knowledge and the other, emotion. But to combine them brings something multifaceted and expressive, passion. To know deeply and to believe deeply is to evoke from the gut a sense of self so grand it echoes from the archives of our histories. A vastness that courses through our veins, as ancient residue: particles and shards of centuries past.
This is life’s teaching and our ongoing learning. A process of becoming or undoing depending on which way one tends more to lean, knowing or believing. It is this layering that is our current tangle, where truth and lies, knowing and believing are passionately intertwined in an effort to find meaning or a resemblance thereof.
“Resolve exists within the passion of knowing and believing, it is here that light emanates, where hope pushes and will pulls.”
It is within this that resolve exists, where the tangle eventually suffocates itself and finds a new path, sows a new seed. Resolve exists within the passion of knowing and believing, it is here that light emanates, where hope pushes and will pulls.