deCastellane Gallery Annex, 535 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
January 15-30th, 2011.
Wednesdays through Sundays, 12-6pm.
Opening reception: Saturday, January 15th, 6-9PM.
FREE to the public.
Thanks to everyone for an excellent opening!
deCastellane Gallery Annex, 535 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
January 15-30th, 2011.
Wednesdays through Sundays, 12-6pm.
Opening reception: Saturday, January 15th, 6-9PM.
FREE to the public.
Things looped, scratched, printed, painted, taped, drawn, sewn, tied, washed, pinned, erased, touched…
These objects and drawings are grounded in the physical; they are the remains of an ever-thoughtful and self-aware motion of the hand. For each of these artists, the hand becomes an extension of private thoughts and musings, allowing every physical mark or placement of fiber—even every erasure—to make those ineffable thoughts clearer and more manageable. There is a consistent spirit of discovery in all of the work, in which the accumulation of marks allows each artist to reflect, to ask to new questions, and to derive clarity by literally building up a surface of answers. Through their fingers, Kolk, Hoffheins, and Yamamoto are constantly seeking the very spirit of the work, the truth of the idea, and the reason for making.
Meredith Hoffheins’ meandering hands create imaginative and lyrical works on
paper that intuitively portray a desire for the unattainable. Her
works can be spare and visionary, or abundant with internal
information.
Elena Yamamoto’s works are thoughts bound up in sources, process, and materials: photos made from negatives that my father took when he was just a few years older than myself; the sun-soaked cyanotype prints with their natural, distinctive, and seductive blue; silk in its softness, its play in the light, its living quality; cedar with its scent and preservative property.
All of these materials, all of these things, each personally important and meaningful, are tied and pinned and sewn together—slowly, quietly, meditatively—in order to become a collection of intimate, personal objects. These objects are manifestations of time spent with ideas, created by a repeated motion of the hand, thought on and thought about. Some of them are just small musings, haphazard thoughts made big through the time it took to meditate and make them, while others are those big ideas of family, legacy, intimacy, and relationships, made small and manageable through their expression in the physical.
These objects—reliquaries, even—contain elusive, ineffable thoughts. Words and sentences and explanations tend to limit our understanding of things, failing to capture ideas and experiences in their entirety, reducing the complexities of feelings and emotions to mere sentiment. And so here instead, I, with cautious hands, tug and pull to lay bare my quiet, personal thoughts and moments for you to ponder.
Whether printed on the page, manifest in continuously looped forms, or carefully arranged structures Lindsay Kolk quietly meditates on the repeated mark. At once familiar and consistent, these marks are intuitively and carefully manipulated, obscured, even destroyed; efforts that intrinsically assign value even to that which appears as a remnant.