This series is dedicated to exploring the multifaceted process of viewing art but it does so within the visually and contextually busy environment of a pluralistic website. In effect, it's not so different from the experience of viewing art in and around the contemporary landscape of blinking billboards and busy social networks. The white cube-style gallery was designed to frame art, to separate and protect it from the rest, and it does the trick well; here we investigate art's possibilities, not despite, but alongside texting, tagging and tweeting.
The artists included in this third installment each work in ways that subtly but courageously arrest the rapid and voracious vision developed to navigate the teeming scope of visual culture. For those viewers that allow a pause in the action, their art has the capacity to slow the eye and the mind to a pace and rhythm akin to contemplation or meditation.
Each artist begins with a concept and, to various degrees, allows this to determine the outcome of their artistic process. But for these artists, concept expands to involve, variously, the psyche, light, breath and growth. In different ways, these artists convey that the conceptual is not limited to the intellectual, nor is intellect the sole property of thought.
Brad Spence's airbrushed paintings, inspired by filmic dream sequences, function like psychological screens. Spence chooses scenes at once familiar and obtuse -- a winding staircase, a dimly lit hallway, a full moon -- as a result, the paintings hover at the juncture between universality and individualism, a space inhabited as readily by Dali as by Jung.
Mary Temple paints images of light on walls bereft of nature. Her trompe-l'œil pictures suggest the presence of foliage and sunshine. To notice her work is to take time out from the onslaught of information, not only to consider light in all its metaphoric connotations, but to participate in an imaginary game as sublime and joy-filled as any at a lazy, sunny picnic.
Nancy Riegelman has been drawing and painting images of her own biorhythms for several years. The elegant results are rooted in the body and in the ethereal but very real passage of time. A basic meditation is to focus on the breath for an extended period, a seemingly simple exercise that can take years to master. Riegelman maps an intense and intimate process.
Mineo Mizuno's ceramic sculptures come to life with an archaic and tenacious plant -- moss. Mizuno's seemingly simple ceramic pods are engineered to support hundreds of tiny plants until they grow over and around one another, fusing into one living, green mass. Mizuno was inspired by the moss that grows over and around so many surfaces in his native Japan.
I have never been to Japan, but as a child, I used to sit in the back reaches of our garden where deep green moss enveloped the aged red brick path petting the soft plant in a kind of reverie. Just as a single viewer's narrative can animate Spence's staircase in one direction or another, Mizuno's sculptures have the capacity to recreate a multi-sensory memory. In connecting their work to an essential experience, these artists carve avenues for attentive viewers to shift their awareness from the crowded surface to more fertile depths.
Artists included: Brad Spence, Mary Temple, Nancy Riegelman and Mineo Mizuno
On Seeing (3)
On Seeing is an exhibition series on The Huffington Post curated by Annie Buckley. It includes emerging and established artists from around the globe. The goal is explore the depth of how we see and reflect on art while expanding the range of ways to view art.
On Seeing is not a commercial series, but in the event that it results in a sale, participating artists and gallerists are invited to donate at least 10 % of the proceeds to a charity of their choice.