Tyler Hodgins and John Luna collaboratively manoeuvre us into The Storage Room & The Corridor.
In the front alcove of the gallery, Hodgins fills the space with fresh, factory new square boxes, compiled into various heights, substantially 8 x 8 feet, building towers of possibility. He structures a convenient, operative corridor surround that allows us to peek into the stacks of his deliberate, interconnected modules.
Presented mostly hanging on a wall we meet as we enter the gallery, some in verso and Corridor, suspended without a wall in the adjacent fore space, Luna’s fervent apertures rede delineation. His paintings consume the picture plane with demonstrative sculptural enquiry. Intensity stored, Luna develops a repository of vigilance and poetry, a passageway to disorienting eruptions of entrenched, rasping colour and paroxysmal form.
Hodgins’ work exudes purity and sanguine optimism. Fresh cardboard smells generate cheerful hope with pervasive buoyancy. The boxes are open and await the containment of apposite venture. Sturdily housing the unknown, Hodgins projects alternative echelons of endeavour, intuitively mounted. A companion drawing with the structure inverted is a reflection of his anticipated vision. Hodgins’ converse stance is a playful Gaudi – like preconstruction edifice that cantilevers above to readdress our perspective – transposes the cloistered storeroom to the spiritual attic where prodigious heights amplify qualified space.
Hodgins system of organization and structure can be envisioned using the Bachelard sensibility in the Poetics of Space: “Bachelard uses the physical characteristics of the house in his phenomenological "topoanalysis" to show the house as metaphor for the self...” ([1]) Reflecting on the storeroom in a house, Hodgins Storeroom as self is a system of harmonious, methodical interactions. References and comparisons to artists with cube discovery, like Sol Lewitt - “The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the system. The visual aspect can't be understood without understanding the system. It isn't what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance.” ([2]) or Rachel Whiteread’s appreciation through the "universal quality of the box" ([3]), we find that Hodgins is in good company. He projects his ‘self’ through a configuration of boxes that are patient, unperturbed, and rhythmic. His unhurried composition generates reassuring repose. The luxury of choice (varying heights of box towers) inspires and relieves. Hodgins’ site-specific work acquaints us with the present, imparting a sense of freedom, existing at least for the duration of this exhibition.
Luna provides means of access to what we struggle to know. Intrepid poetry, each work gnaws and squeezes, crushes and substantiates with colour, paper, canvas, wax, wire. He encloses and reframes, edging toward pugnacious rebellion. Sometimes we see the abstracted picture plane; and unpredictably, the ‘verso’. The face copes, allowing the verso to exist in raw aggression and aversion or painful beauty and mystic ardour (Lakeshore). With subverted grays drawing a reluctant closure or finality (Window) and marked scoring, with the eclipse of overpowering vision (Corridor), Luna penetrates fear. Incisions haemorrhage on the reverse (1000 Hrs Later [The Pulmonary Artery - Verso]), ruminating and rebelling; he aligns with disruptive banality (Sign – Verso). “To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!” ([4]) Luna’s forthright, rousing accounts consistently assert intense orchestral passion.
Luna’s deference to Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns leads us to understand a history of material manipulation, a Combine. ([5]) However, there is more intuitive handling by Luna, more reverberation tempered by arch vigour. “...allow that the instances of so many things coming together in so rough a way generates its own patina, one that retroactively, inexplicably, forms its own history, legend of beginning, and underlying yield of truth.” ([6]) This quote from Luna’s essay, Pedestrian Colour strategizes one of his working premises. We are permitted long looks into his rationale; his candour supersedes legend of beginning, as his accession to truth is the result of years of investigation, creating an ominous pathos as patina.
Each composition converges and evolves. Suspended thoughts strain and progress, disconnect and refine, elegantly and unpredictably touch and alight significance. “It is true, sometimes the genius loves the strange shapes, but the thinker can read in its arcane figures, discern and know the emphasis of the verse that creates fantastic lightning from a sublime idea.” ([7]) Luna’s work embodies obdurate, audacious perseverance, tenacious investigative prowess, sometimes taking years to perfect the work. He undertakes the protracted risk we impatiently dread and shows us the results that coursing time allows. Luna supplants with cumulative abandon.
Hodgins amassed congress provides furtive circumnavigation where the surrounding corridor keeps activity around the work undisclosed. Privacy, cornering secrecy prevails. Hodgins storeroom monolith creates a welcome isolation. Trusting in the liberating cache, a consequence of his spatial construct, Hodgins affords participants a contracted, reliable retreat.
Luna’s mindscapes are extroverted sanctuaries where he harbours and dissuades, considers and demarcates consuming provocation and impulsion, proliferates in the privacy of introspection. "While working I have never thought of the theme of solitude. I have absolutely no intention of being an artist of solitude. Moreover, I must add that as a citizen and a thinking being I believe that all life is the opposite of solitude, for life consists of a fabric of relations with others...” ([8]) We can consider Luna in relation to Giacometti’s riposte regarding Existentialist readings of his work. Luna has the propensity to exude his acute discernment of life’s interactions and we benefit from his sincerity.
The Storage Room & The Corridor is a concerted endeavor. Concurrently, two distinct views of space and time cohesively thrive to showcase concord. The unrelenting, askew squares of painted planar distortions echo unruffled cubed boxes. We see the void of unknown prospects residing along vistas of confrontation. Both artists exhibit authenticity, which binds them. Veracity accumulates and disclosures of new conduits of understanding merge. Hodgins and Luna work in paradoxical alliance.
Tyler Hodgins & John Luna
The Storage Room & The Corridor
16 July - 14 August 2010
Deluge Art Gallery - Victoria BC
[1] Joan Ockman reviews The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard via http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/6books_ockman.html [Feb 2005]
[2] http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/archived/2010/kaldor_projects/projects/1977_sol_lewitt
[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4326462.stm
[4] Louis Ferdinand Celine (French writer and physician, 1894-1961)
[5] http://www.lightmillennium.org/2006_17th/rrauschenberg_met.html
[6] John Luna. Pedestrian Colour: http://www.slideroomgallery.com/PEDESTRIAN%20COLOUR%20Essay.pdf
[7] Poesie e novelle in versi, by Ferdinando Fontana, 1877: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/9642
[8] P. Selz, New Images of Man, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959, p. 11
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