Charles Stankievech created "Gravity's Rainbow" during a recent residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, near Cape Canaveral. The work produces "slight chromatic shifts and interference patterns" by bouncing a thin slice of white light across a pair of turntables to create oscillating gradations of color and reflections that look like luminescent rings taken out of Saturn's gravitational field. Specific vinyl records - Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon," and a recording of Neil Armstrong produced the same year and found in Germany, where the V2 rocket was invented - have been chosen in response to the aerospace industry in the Southern California region and to LA, where Thomas Pynchon wrote the novel whose titular reference is used to collapse time and space around Stankievech's work.
Shima Iuchi's interest in coastal landscapes and ecosystems extends from early memories of trips to ancient whaling villages in her native Japan through to recent research off the coast of British Columbia where she learned to identify Orca whale calls. Exploring the relationship between the Japanese and Pacific Northwest coasts through video, journals and sculpture has also led her to make parallels between human travel, mapping, memory, and a sense of place, with the experiences of the largest sea creatures. Critic Bettina Matzkuhnty has noted, "Iuchi's ability to synthesize disparate influences is exhilarating, as we course down a valley's physical and human history." See animations here.
Jen Rae's biomorphic drawings of tree burls, in white pencil crayon on tar paper, are at a scale that echoes and engulfs the human body. Rae's investigation of materials has taken her between the industrial and the domestic; around the time these works were made she was also exploring reversal, absence and erasure. The burl is a site of conflict and resolution for a tree, where some stress or impurity is integrated into the tree's structure. "After spending three years working in a hospital directly with patients," says Rae of a residency she did at The University of Alberta Hospital, "I observed various states of human vulnerability and resilience. This experience engaged me to investigate themes of fragility, intimacy, and ephemerality."
Ed Bamiling uses the plasticity afforded by ceramics to link geologic time to human and artistic process. He is inspired by clay's "ability to act as historical document," to record marks and the passage of time, the way erosion and weathering act as drawings on earth. In two large wall-works, "Cloud Tablets" and "Horizons," he explores "the natural rhythms of everyday life - the ephemeral movement of clouds, the inexorable power of water and waves, the daily arrival and departure of light" and their affects on us, whether or not we're aware of them. He is also keenly interested in "the influence of the natural environment on human culture" and conversely, the impact of human activity on that environment.
Matthew Walker explores issues in landscape, memory and narrative using metaphors. In a fragmented ceramic sculpture modeled on a Pleistocene-era Glyptodon shell, he merges an archaeological search through the fossil record with storytelling, specifically the aboriginal creation myth of the world sitting on the back of a turtle. The history of the work suggests utility. It once functioned as a buoy, setting a point of reference; now its failure to act as a nautical marker untethers it from the landscape. Resonating with the shell's dual function as physical object and metaphor / myth, a series of contrasting, heavily-applied charcoal drawings with mutable orientation have been located in the gallery in response to the space. With all these weighted objects, Walker presents an open question about the accident of generating meaning, how forms are reconstituted as narratives, and the way mutable truths are perceived.
Ying-Yueh Chuang makes hybrid forms out of intensely colored and textured ceramic that are inspired by both organic and non-natural sources. Her work references symmetry and pattern-making that occur within nature. She makes close observation of plant life, but also the aesthetically pleasing arrangement of vegetables in the grocery store, where she says the environment best highlights their inherent structural patterns. Chuang combines individual pieces to make units, or building blocks, that can then multiply to form larger and more complex patterns, expanding exponentially. By the time they reach installation on the floor or wall, her work is not only a controlled explosion of color and texture like you might find in a sea anemone or an exotic flower, it also starts to look like a higher order of math. The work in this exhibition is composed of over 800 separate units.
Paul Jackson responds specifically to the environment of the Southern California and Mexico with photographic works and video shot in the Imperial Dunes and a tourist resort in Oaxaca, both of which oscillate between document and fantasy. In the video, the cones of two headlights sweep across the barren sandscape reminding us that not far away from this recreational site, searchlights comb the US-Mexico border. In the Mexican resort, the presence of the untamed landscape imprisons the manufactured-natural setting for tourists with huge foreboding cacti standing like sentries. Accompanying sculptural works play upon the same themes of latent or potential violence. Cast bronze 2 x 4's monumentalize the way tame construction materials, when broken across the grain, resemble the majesty and trauma of a tree in the forest snapped off by the only force capable of true devastation: nature.