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Opening reception: Thursday March 13, 6-9 PM
Part of Three Related Exhibitions curated by Lawrence Rinder
These three related exhibitions explore form as vehicle for imaginative experience. The artists here use form as a provocation to attention and as an armature for understanding. Abstract as they are, these works are not simply self-referential but rather allude to conditions and capacities of the mind.
Form + presents works by six San Francisco area artists whose work resonates with Jamme's mirror poems and with his collection of Tantric drawings. Form, in these works, is only deceptively the center of attention. Todd Bura's small paintings are inordinately stimulating for works that provide so little in the way of imagery, color, or texture. It is this very superabundance of sensation that is the real subject of Bura's apparently minimal, formalistic works. Similarly, Léonie Guyer's reductive drawings attend to shape as a kind of powerful reverse explosion. Her quizzical forms gather the energy around them into a super-potent visual moment. Dean Smith's drawings, although rigorously dependent on pre-ordained rules of execution, overflow with visual and visceral sensation. There is a compelling balance in his work between expansion and condensation. A related dichotomy is evident in Phil McGaughy's sculptures which integrate geometrical construction with organic wood forms. In contrast to his expansive constructed elements, McGaughy's found driftwood and manzanita sticks accrue a powerful internalizing gravity. Evelyn Reyes' series of abstracted carrots employs repetition and a certain intensity of execution to suggest a Platonic vision of a common garden vegetable. Within the similarity of her forms one finds engaging differences. Prajakti Jayavant's painted paper constructions similarly pose provocative questions about the limits of difference and our capacity to frame experience meaningfully. On the verge of sheer materiality, her works betray the barest echoes of formal intent, and thereby attune our awareness to the wonder of artistic possibility.
