Incise, Echo and Repeat Catalog Essay
by Camilla Fallon and Kylie Heidenheimer for the exhibition Incise, Echo & Repeat, February 2019, Clemente Center, NYC. Curators, Kylie Heidenheimer and Camilla Fallon.
Artists: JoAnne Carson, Susanna Coffey, Elisabeth Condon, Camilla Fallon, Kylie Heidenheimer, Pinkney Herbert, Mary Jones, Amy Mahnick, Laura Newman, Sirikil Pattachote, Walter Schrank, Clintel Steed, Mie Yim.
These painters twist and fracture the space within the frame in myriad ways. A few reference still life, nature, and urban spaces that include construction sites and aerial views. Others fracture the space with gesture and activate it in the paintings frame through geometric or organic linear division. Fracturing and fragmenting exists in various formsand serves different purposes. In nature there is order and disorder. Fracturing can be arbitrary, as in an earthquake,or ordered, as in the way a crystal or schist breaks with the same or similar patterning. Geometry always plays a role in both painting and nature. Fractured space is one manifestation and it can be architectural and ordered, or chaotic, explosive or fragmented.
Carson says “a defining factor of our age” is “the shift from ‘organic’ to ‘synthetic’ nature.” Her intention is clear in “Hole Jumper,” where flowers exist as drastically irregular and awkwardly crystalline. Condon’s work is “derived from Chinese landscape paintings,” and her “scenes boldly visualize a . . .multi-layered world.” (Lily Wei) This is evident in the patched and fitted backgrounds in “American Bird” and “Secret Understory.” Herbert’s recent work has been described by Frederic Koeppel as “pent-up power and desire that resonates with a peculiar blend of animated and meditative qualities.” This mixture is part fractured backgrounds, as we see in “Searchlight.” Yet this piece’s frontal plane contains still-larger broken areas that re-form into a new, complete shape.
The literal subject of Fallon’s“Isoceles” and “Center” is a “construction site with complicated scaffolding.” Yet in it, “geometric shapes form and repeat in overlapping patterns, and engage in space-twisting, fracturing, and fragmenting.” At other times symmetrical, broad shapes come together in a whole in a manner that is akin to Herbert’s. Newman’s “Heat” also pulsates with broad surface breakups, creating spatial tension between the latter and depth. She accomplishes this via color that “is saturated and matte” and with space that is “warped” and lines that are “active and almost three-dimensional.” (Jennifer Riley) Heidenheimer’s “Chamber” and “Garden” twist and wrest space within the frames and lines often run past and off their edges. They seem to indicate, as Stephen Maine writes, that “something is going on outside or underneath [their] skin.”
While Coffey’s portraits are steeped in observation (at times with herself before a photo mural in front of a mirror), their roles extend beyond it. She comments on the “we” that central figure and background evoke. (AnnLandi) Fragments piece together such meta focus in the foliage of “Green” and the flowers of “Flowery Skull.” Steed say of his paintings that they are “the explosion of an image and the impact that it makes.” He also notes that “the way we live life right now . . .there is a lot of jumbling. Everything becomes fractured.” “Robotic Legs” reflects the latter via an aerial view of conjoined bricolage. Amy Mahnick’s still lives are often of sculpture she creates.“The sculpture I’m painting now is a shell made of fragments lined with pink felt that elicits an emotional response . . .” “Blue Aggregate” and “#7” become fractured, seemingly in accordance with the spatial directions and tension the set-ups elicit.
For Pattachote, guides are “the laws of nature and three characteristics of existence in Buddhist Dharma: impermanence,incompleteness, and non-self.” In “Folding Heart” and “Connect,” breaks are literal with regard to the sheets of paper that she joins. She paints delicate transparencies and drips on them and includes occasional fragments of paper. The transparencies act as a veil, while the drips further fragment the image. Of her canvases, Peter Frank writes that Mary Jones “practices a heterogeneous gesturality, evoking cosmologies of paint in colorful,almost galactic explosions of brushstrokes . . . ” In “Lion” and “The Renaissance”, Jones uses X-rays and feather wallpaper to create inlays that shimmer between the literal and the suggested. Schrank’s paintings have fluidity, yet marks and colors fracture and fragment the surface with poetic, light-filled gestures. At first abstract, they piece together in ways suggestive of nature and interiors. In her statement, Yim describes “the tension of . . .illustrative figures” and “floppy paint obliterating them, letting abstraction come through . . .” Bulging, bound beings in“Handicap” and “Beast” contain curvilinear lines and shapes in contrast to many others’ rectilinear forms, which incise,echo, and repeat.