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In Flux: Meditations on Space and TimePost an Event »

Swarm Gallery

June 26 - July 26, 2010

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560 Second Street Oakland, CA 94607
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In Flux: Meditations on Space and Time Robin Johnston, Two Weeks in July, Point Bonita (2009), Handwoven cotton, 22 x 58 inches
Swarm Gallery is thrilled to present the exploratory works of Robin Johnston and Chelsea Pegram in In Flux: Meditations on Space and Time. Highly oriented toward materiality and process, Johnston and Pegram each uniquely explore concepts of space and time. Robin Johnston’s work illuminates the quieter side of things, and deals with measuring time and the sense of loss that accompanies its passing. Working with drawing, installation, and the widely forgotten medium of weaving, Johnston creates with plain materials and basic patterns to overemphasize simplicity. Her intention is to bring into focus a certain stillness that is hard to define, a reverence for patience and humility. Other information such as light and temperature is collected and tracked during the making, creating real-time maps. Johnston draws on global issues, such as war, to meditate on her feelings of distance and misinformation in today’s political climate. There are several levels of translation involved in the measurement and charting of various elements into an installation, drawing or woven structure. These conversions add to the painstaking slowness of her process as well as enrich the meaning. The interplay between order and chaos within the parameters of her weaving draws parallels to the constantly interrupted flow of daily life. Quantifying and categorizing information, thoughts, emotions and physical environment, she is exploring her own relationship to time, process, and the world around her. Johnston’s recent work is based on daily tide chart data. This work illustrates the constant, cyclical tides, but seeks to emphasize the artist’s own feelings of reverence for and distance from the cycle. It also hints at the underlying fact of a slowly rising sea level, acknowledging the impact human existence has on the earth’s natural time rhythms. Chelsea Pegram investigates relationships through the creation of intimate yet barricaded spaces. Working with a multitude of materials - soft, hard, tensile, viscous - she is looking to engage viewers in a "subconscious" mode in which one responds to the physicality of materials beyond given meaning or labels. The evidence of process appears intentionally in her work, as she cuts, stretches, bends, pulls and wraps surfaces to evoke ideas of rupture and healing, growth and fragility. Her objects contain networks of spaces, marked off by membrane-like barriers that are loaded with meaning, as if the meaning itself was collected and contained. The formal qualities of planes and spaces refer directly to the privilege art has to capture all parts of our life and world, reinterpret them, and return them in altered states.
In Flux: Meditations on Space and Time Chelsea Pegram, Untitled installation view (2010), Drywall, tracing paper, polyurethane