Every story appropriates just as every draft lies. In a sense, the very act of storytelling is a form of appropriation, a borrowing, and the process of drafting is tantamount to the process of crafting a lie. We know this. We can accept it. So why do we invariably return to art and to fiction for an approximation of the truth? What is it about the story, the painted landscape, the finely crafted illusion that emanates the distinct odor of certainty? How does a reveal, a mistake, or an illusion all become part of the same nebulous other place?
All of the art in Mind Storm evokes a sense of metaphysics, of visual riddles: Oliver Jeffers' calculated seascapes, Marcel Van Eeden's noirish meta-narratives, Shea Hembrey's rectilinear cheat-codes to the universe, and Robert Currie's articulation of vanishing points into a visual conundrum. The exhibition is an arrangement of psychic substance. All appropriated realities, to one degree or another, story-works, stealing what is real.
"He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment." - Thomas Pynchon, V
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Robert Currie (b. 1976) works across the mediums of sculpture, installation and drawing to produce work that explores the inevitability of the emergence of order from disorder.
For this exhibition, Currie presents new iterations of his wall-based kinetic artworks for the first time in color. Though created systematically, these pieces accentuate the human touch in the hand-painting of thousands of strands of nylon within a Perspex case. As the viewer encounters a piece, an image appears, yet only from one viewpoint. These works subtly direct the viewer's arbitrary movements through the gallery to slowly converge on a fixed point. The precise placement of materials and his fascination with line and form produce works that describe solid architectural forms, yet contain an ephemeral and illusive quality.
Marcel van Eeden (b. 1965) uses imagery culled from an array of historical material – books, atlases, films, newspaper clippings and photo archives- to make timeless drawings of a world he never knew.
The works in this exhibition illustrate excerpts from chapter five in Thomas Pynchon's debut Novel V, published in 1963. This chapter, titled "In Which Stencil Nearly Goes West with an Alligator", follows the protagonist Benny Profane on an alligator-hunting mission in the sewers of Manhattan. Many interpretations consider this a modern reprise of Melville's Moby Dick. Like the myth of the white whale, the myth of the alligators in the sewers taps into unconscious fears and desires. If Moby Dick is the great novel of human versus nature across the oceans of the Earth, V is the great novel of human versus culture inside the sewers of the city.
Shea Hembrey (b. 1974) makes artwork representative of a self-generated iconography and a rural American mysticism emphasizing a connection between particle physics and a nearly monastic contemplation of nature.
For Mind Storm, Hembrey has created a series of trompe l'oeil paintings with arrangements of "tape" and scraps of " photo paper" that reflect on the unseen structure of the universe and the desire to communicate invisible truths. These paintings start with at least fifty layers of black paint that the artist developed at the Golden paint factory. He then creates the "photo paper" by painting a smooth layer of white paint on a silicone-baking sheet to be peeled off once dried. He creates a digital image of nonexistent constellations and stellar clusters that are printed onto the "photo paper". He then uses a needle to pierce the edges until they appear torn. The transparent "tape" is applied with clear acrylic paint.
Oliver Jeffers' (b. 1977) work takes many forms, from figurative painting and installation to illustration and picture-book making.
Jeffers presents here paintings from an ongoing body of work called Measuring Land and Sea - an investigation of the philosophical impasse at which art and science often find themselves. One is subjective, while the other is defined by the pursuit of objectivity. Yet, both express two very human characteristics – feeling and reasoning. This series combines classical landscape painting with systems of technical measurement, presenting the viewer with both artistic and scientific modes of representation. In the seascapes, superimposed numbers mark the depth of the ocean in fathoms, a now obsolete system for measuring depth.