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Poiesis
Front Gallery June 21 - July 28, 2001 |
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Fragment: pleasure and pain in which being enjoys and suffers under existence. It is in this sense that art is a fragment. Poiesis: rewriting or remaking of the observed world. Marianne Lovink and Sheila Moss are informed by science and the natural world; their context is culture. Ideas of growth and mutability are prevalent in the work; beauty is applied to seduce and subvert common notions. Drawing as a medium is both meditative and precise. Moss's Marrow Drawings are fluid and intricate, a cross section of weird flowers or stars. The apparently even pattern is actually off kilter. Their inspiration is Moss's 1997 piece, Collide-a-scope, a home-made kaleidescope whose changing patterns are created using chicken bones. These patterns serve as the matrix for drawings that diverge from their origin and metamorphose into a poetically rewritten system. Cross sections of excretory and reproductive systems inform Lovink's Urogenital Configurations. The drawn forms are filled in with plexiglas finished with graphite or aluminum. The specific systems create numerous associations, referencing scientific, medical and anatomical journals that mutate into stories that are "science and modernist theories told from some body's position, stories that can be rewritten."1 Through observation and rewriting, Lovink renews the image of a diseased cellular body in Gut by removing it from its usual laboratory setting and placing it into an aesthetic and conceptual realm. Made from twisted fabric, impregnated with resin and handled with black paint and an aluminum rub, its size and form alienates and seduces. We think intestines and knotted subjects but also of intricacy and delicate balance within organic systems. In contrast, Moss's video piece, Pool, a gentle mass of petals moving on water, is ephemeral. While a pattern is discernable, the movement of the petals is random and evocative. The mass of shifting shapes appears alive and expansive, at once lyrical and threatening. "Rewriting may vacillate between citation, reproduction, system-integrated innovation ... and the production of something not entirely new, but 'undisciplined,' derived from somewhere else."2 Combining the conceptual and the formal seamlessly, the drawings expand on given structures while Pool and Gut, leaning on known systems, emerge from observed phenomena, in Moss's case, and the free play with forms suggestive of specific bodies, in Lovink's. They are the art that "takes as its theme and place the opening [frayage] of sense as such along sensuous surfaces, a 'presentation of presentation,' the motion and emotion of a coming."3
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Moss's Nebula (Scientist Flowers) is some two hundred flower shapes.
Each petal bears the image of a scientist -- famous and obscure -- arranged on
the wall in the structure of a galaxy. The
nebula recalls an en masse explosion, a dynamic and suspended moment
where a natural occurrence is juxtaposed with scientific innovation and
homage to the power of ideas. Singular and plural, "painting being
always on the threshold ... offering access; sense itself, which is not
the access that accedes to nothing, but the access that infinitely
accedes, ever forward into the night/the day, into the trace that
divides and joins them.... The clear and the obscure no longer present
things (significations), but themselves come to the eye, to its contact,
while nonetheless remaining infinitely intact."4
With homage there is renewal. Influenced by Camillo Golgi (1844-1926), who developed a
staining technique to show the details of individual nerve cells, Lovink
created Golgi's Stain. The images look much like a landscape in which
the earth itself has been dissected to show us where the roots of plants
proceed downward, culminating in sacs. Lovink "draws" a
three-dimensional image by hanging sculpted, steel rods in front of an
aluminum frame; the shadows cast by the steel rods draw us into an
evocative and eerie anatomical landscape in metamorphosis.
While the very scale and materiality of Lovink's work is visceral and
encompassing, Moss's is fleeting and prismatic. Both artists laud
scientific endeavour and wonder at the natural world while also
pinpointing a certain anxiety. Changing patterns, the delicacy of
nerves, the threat of mutating cells which careen out of control and
into disease are addressed here. There is a clear cautioning against the
simplification of structures that can turn a predictable pattern into a
dangerous random element. As our bodies negotiate these installations we
can rethink, as the artists rewrite, the familiar for "revolution
clearly signifies a paradigm shift, a radical rewriting or remaking
(poiesis) of the observed world, a rewriting which is discontinuous with
the 'normal' paradigm."5
Corinna Ghaznavi
Poiesis Intro
Notes
1. Terry Threadgold, Feminist Poetics: Poiesis, Performance, Histories, London and New York, Routledge 1997: 1.
2. Threadgold 1997: 33.
3. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, tran. Jeffrey S. Librett, Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press 1997: 135.
4. Nancy 1997: 82f.
5. Threadgold 1997: 33.
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Above Image: Marianne Lovink Golgi's Stain (detail), 2000 steel, aluminum, graphite 96 x 48 x 2 inches photo: courtesy of artist
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Sheila Moss received her B.F.A. from the Pratt Institute and her M.F.A. from Syracuse University.
Since 1994 she has exhibited throughout the United States with solo and two person exhibitions at the Ebert Art
Gallery in Wooster, Ohio, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, and Edwin
A. Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita. Moss lives and works in Brooklyn,
N.Y. and is represented by Roebling Hall in Brooklyn. Marianne Lovink completed her B.F.A. at Queen's University and attended the Art Studio Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Since 1991 she has exhibited throughout Canada. Recent solo exhibitions were shown at Katharine Mulherin Gallery, the Durham Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Mississauga. Lovink lives and works in Toronto. |
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