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Ampersand International Arts

September 9 - October 10, 2011

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1001 Tennessee Street San Francisco, CA 94107
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Three Forms Evelyn Reyes. Cakes, 2003; oil pastel on paper; 11 7/8 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Creativity Explored, San Francisco.
Opening reception: Friday, Sept. 9, 6:30 to 8:30 Curated by Patricia Maloney Ampersand International Arts is pleased to present Three Forms, an exhibition featuring sculptures by Jeff Jamieson, prints by Sol LeWitt, and drawings by Evelyn Reyes. Three Forms explores these artists’ systematic adherence to a form or gesture and the visual cadences they produce in allowing color to be the variable within their equations. Repetition does not lead to stasis or inertia; rather, it expands the work rhythmically so that pattern and shape amplify across the space of a room. The abstracted individual forms or lines combine into sequences that operate both linguistically and structurally; meaning evolves from recognizing the syntax the artists employ. San Luis Obispo–based artist Jeff Jamieson produces small-scale painted wood sculptures that punctuate space. The bent arms of the folded strips become semaphores that both compose and perform a rhythmic message, with the spaces between them providing a tempo. Viewed all at once, these sculptures seem to mimic both the formal meter of poetry and the natural modulation in pitch and tone of voices in conversation, so the end result is a composed and intimate framing of the space they occupy. Sol LeWitt’s 1972 set of eight silkscreens, Arcs from Sides or Corners, Grids & Circles (S-11), suggest a similar tension between the structural and the poetic. The eight prints demonstrate the variations produced from changing the combination of colors used to execute a simple formula: overlaying a grid with a series of concentric circles and arcs emanating from the sides or corners. Each print is a different arrangement of black, yellow, red, and blue lines densely layered to create an overall tone. These prints reverberate and pulse as shapes and patterns come in and out of focus. The patterns resemble sound waves rippling across the surface of the colored plane. Conversely, Evelyn Reyes, who works through the Creativity Explored studio in San Francisco, produces solid, block-like shapes in oil pastels. She describes her serial and individual drawings in terms of food items and containers——cakes, carrots, coffee cups, and garbage cans——but they also closely resemble architectural and ornamental forms. Reyes’ work possesses a ritualistic, almost ceremonial, aspect that is evident both in the dense, impasto-like rubbing of the pastel on paper, and in her most repeated form, the carrot, whose angularity resemble pennants heralding a parade. The drawings operate in march-step, each carrot taking up and continuing a joyful cadence. Collectively, these artists have deliberately or instinctively taken on the principles of architecture while also operating in the reductive visual language of shape, volume, and line. The work included in Three Forms suggests that experience might be distilled into form and still retain its vibrancy, its hum. Here, adherence to a single form becomes an expansive experience in which color and rhythm push back the boundaries of seeing.