On Art & Water

as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded forever

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851

Regardless of taste, education or aesthetic inclination, people engage with the visual arts for personal reasons and the greatest artists can touch large numbers of people in very intimate ways. Consider that art affects each person, as differently, as there are types of people who participate and it becomes clear that creating powerful art is no small task. For some people living and breathing Art is secondary to drinking water, for others it is like visiting the mist tent at a hot summer music festival, some form of relief.

Like the visual arts, the discourse surrounding water is inherently public, carried out in both scholarly and popular media. Of the numerous articles and volumes written about water, most begin with an eloquent delivery of statistics imparting the value of water and its necessity in the genesis and sustaining of life. Water is a very special liquid by itself and in the right hands it becomes so much more. Artists throughout history have depicted and used water in compelling ways. It is a medium with potential to reach everyone because the need for water is pervasive. Artists can reach audiences beyond their community so effectively and so clearly that it is truly possible to reach an international, global audience in addition to the local.

The physical composition of water provides for it’s place of esteem among elements and is similar in import to the work of Icelandic Artist Olafur Eliasson. By creating thoughtful, moving and poetic installations, Eliasson affects large numbers of people. With in his artwork the relationship between concept, audience, message and medium is fluid. Engaging with this work one gets the sense that each component, whether conceptual or formal, works together and harmoniously as if intentionally conceived with respect to the all of the other elements.

To create conceptually tight and visually impressive artworks requires skill. Imagine the tension required to manage the various components necessary to create moving artworks at a grand scale. Basic physics describes the surface tension of water as similar to an elastic membrane in which each molecule acts to keep all other molecules together and thus fluid. Eliasson’s work Beauty (1993) consists of an illuminated source of mist, on the ceiling of a dark gallery. A simple description, a simple premise. Yet, however, in reality encountering this work is actually much more grandiose. A sparkling rainbow beckons you to enter the other wise dark gallery, shimmering, it appears to float in some visible breeze.

This rainbow conjures numerous associations that draw you out of the gallery momentarily before the mist hits your skin and you feel the temperature drop suddenly and unexpectedly. The tiny drops of water collecting on your skin pull you back inside the gallery. And while everyone has this experience, not everyone, has this experience exactly. Depending upon your entry, the crowd, where you wind up etc. everyone sees a rainbow in the illuminated mist but each rainbow is experienced differently because of the random nature of mist, the equally random nature determining your position, as well as the random nature of personal histories affecting the experience. Everyone will not see the exact same rainbow. Beauty demonstrates an artistic elasticity that allows Eliasson to reach numerous participants on their own terms. Giving them an opportunity to transform.

A cursory glimpse of the current conversation surrounding the contemporary state of water includes stories about shortages, dosing, chemicals and disaster. The need for respite is justified. Whether one possesses the specialized vocabulary to engage in an academic dialogue about the contemporary state of water, or one refers to water simply as a liquid, everyone experiences the physical properties of water. Thus charging water with power adept artists like Eliasson can use to transcend platitudes and give people true common ground to stand on. Water represents an objective truth because it acts according to scientifically established principals all humans relate to and because everyone needs it water has the potential to reach truly everyone.

Point-to-Multipoint

Point-to-Multipoint is an installation I made as an artist in residence at the Elsewhere Artist Collaborative in Greensboro, North Carolina. I was looking at several different systems local to Greensboro yet relevant to many communities across the country. I was also fortunate enough to be able to integrate aspects of previous studio research and inquiry somewhat seamlessly.

Networks are a collection of smaller entities working together to form a larger entity. Communication, transportation and the nervous system, for instance, all share ten characteristics inherent to "systems" they each contain senders, receivers, channels, transport, traffic/payload, security, signaling, scheduling, terminals and ancillaries. There are two main kinds of networks, point-to-point and point-to-multipoint. In point-to-point networks traffic moves from one node to another such as with roads and telephones. In point-to-multipoint networks traffic moves from a central hub that controls the flow of traffic to different nodes, ie. nodes are not directly connected and resources and information are mediated.

Marvels of Construction

MARVELS OF CONSTRUCTION are a collection of meticulously constructed digital images that are part textbook illustration and part civil engineering dreamscapes that analyze the product of human invention, blurring the fine line between wonder and folly in human ingenuity. MARVELS OF CONSTRUCTION questions whether human creativity has built a utopia or created something disastrous and inescapable. This idea is compounded by the fact that the images exist only in a digital, non-physical state as if caught between dream and its physical manifestation.

Bryson Gil @ Triple Base SF

Bryson Gill’s painting, Cosmo (Backdrop) does that thing that great paintings do, it calls you forth, pushes you back and then calls you in again. Like a dear friend it’s hard to let Cosmo go. Gill combines oil paintings, works on paper and sculpture for his solo exhibition The Friends and Neighbors Effect, at Triple Base in San Francisco. Throughout the exhibit repeated forms, image fragments and moments of artistic strategy slowly reveal themselves and the echo of these moments creates a feeling of immediate intimacy, compelling us to get lost in the visually rich world created by Gill. This particular combination of different mediums is a risk with a solid payoff despite a nagging feeling that the drawings and sculpture seem less developed. The real gems, however, are the paintings.

The seven modestly sized oil paintings that Gill presents are comprised of two main motifs, what I am calling the backdrops and the icons. The icon paintings contain central dominant objects that appear to be from non-Western culture, painted in the vernacular of the still life then obscured by simple painted geometric shapes. The overt collage feeling that these paintings evoke negates an interesting rumination on painted space because the potential for a specific reading of collage as source material is too much to get away from.

Conversely, the backdrop paintings open up and allow for plenty of room to move. Take Cosmo(Backdrop) for instance, from far away, Cosmo reads like a grand landscape with a daytime sky. As you approach the painting and the components become clearer, the spatial relationships become more complex and we are denied our initial feeling of concrete clarity. Is this a painting of a painting or a painting of a scene painted on some sort of backdrop? And just like that, the space collapses.

Two important shadows drive this collapse, one cast on the “sky” from what appears to be a modernist sculpture made of simple geometric shapes on top of an ancient looking column and the second cast by the “sky” itself on a surface presumably just behind. While attempting to make sense of this space a cast of characters appear on cue to conflate any sense of order. Hard edge, stenciled flora that physically juts out of the canvas, a curious delicate mobile floating somewhere in front and the fact that this “sky” is a thick mess of paint that appears to be slathered on with a knife (which betrays any sense of lightness that a painting of a sky should have) all conspire against any easy reading. Cosmo(Background) has contradictions to spare, contradictions in space and scale delivered in a pleasing palette of blues, purple, mocha and red serve not to confuse but to create the kind of space necessary for real philosophical thought.

If our friends are allies out of choice, our neighbors could be seen as allies out of necessity. While all of the pieces in The Friends and Neighbors Effect seem to belong, only a few of them will remain true friends. Cosmo(Backdrop) and the other backdrop paintings command attention with a satisfying color palette and hold our interest with the tensions of many contradictions challenging us to find something larger just under their rich surfaces.

Artist Statement Test

Working tensions between hosts of contradictions I create visually engaging pictures that act as space for real contemplation. Drawing on memorable images from popular media, I take liberties with American cultural narratives as a departure point for larger conversations in which tropes associated with physical mobility operate as metaphors for social mobility. I make collage, drawings and paintings that explore the present through the lens of history, interchanging myths, fictions etc in an attempt to get at some semblance of truth.