Gallery Visits

January 21, 2018

TESSELLATED
Samantha Homes & Jaclyn Head
RINGEL GALLERY

Artists are people who provide us new insights. In that case, Samantha Holmes totally deserves the title ‘artist’ for her creative art pieces –projecting Islamic mosaics patterns onto 3-dimensional real-life objects.

Islamic mosaics have highly developed geometric patterns, and often the viewers are just busy perceiving such intricate combinations of shapes and colors so that they don’t really have many freedom and time of interpreting those mosaics in their own point of view. Holmes wonders, however, how would the reality reacts when projected such highly ordered patterns. She was only observing the chemistry between Islamic mosaics and real-life objects, but deeper questions remained to be thought about –the influence of different religious rules on the reality.

As the artist herself said, “And I liked that as a way to think about the world. That you have all these pieces of something coming together and nothing is necessarily right or perfect or aligned, but you can put things together in a way to create something greater than the sum of its parts.” She explained in the opening of the “TESSELLATED” exhibition that Islamic mosaic patterns stand for spiritual order and real-life objects stand for scientific orders. The society tend to look at those two as opposite from each other, but by projecting one onto another she created something that represents both spiritual and scientific orders. So the pattern she re-created enables us to look at the spirit and science at the same time. How groundbreaking is this idea!

What’s more, although Holmes’ work was made of steel, she managed to create an illusion that her patterns are going to sway with the breeze. Her work is always full of ‘opposites.’

Different from Holmes’ monochromatic art pieces while sharing the same Islamic mosaics inspiration, Jakie Head’s colorful geometric tiles balance the whole gallery space. Her works have a lighter atmosphere as if the geometric shapes are playing games with one another, and that attribute to her way of creating—“I really like creating puzzles for myself to solve, and that’s kind of how tessellations involve themselves in my work,” she said.

Overall this exhibition breaks my limit of imagination to a great extent. The beautiful tiles of Head turned the whole dull gray-ish wall into an energetic space. Holmes found a perfect middle point between spiritual and scientific order. I enjoyed those brilliant pieces a lot!

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January 27, 2018

Sixty Square Inches XIX
Fountain Gallery

This exhibition shows us images done in an area of 60 square inches, which is pretty small compared to the works that people usually see. Since the pieces were pretty tiny, I had to stand really close to those works in order to observe everything. This does offer viewers a more intimate relationship especially when compared to the crowded gathering together in front of ‘Starry Night’ by Van Gogh in MOMA, New York.

One of my favorite piece there is ‘Untitled II,’ polyester plate lithography, Georgia, 2015 by Stephanie Smith. There are only 3 layers of colors, so it’s not as complicated as many other works in this exhibition. I was attracted by the lightness of the bird at first. Maybe the turquoise helped lightening the atmosphere. I almost felt like there was a breeze blowing from this piece towards me. However, the light atmosphere lasted only for a few seconds because the dense green basket (I was assuming so) with many black stripes suddenly occupied all my attention. This basket not only restricted the little bird, but also put weight on my mind. The contrast between the lightness of the bird and the denseness of the basket was really strong and captured all my attention.

I also loved ‘I Remember,’ monoprint with gum Arabic transfer and relief solar plate, Pennsylvania by Lucy Gans. The main subject of this piece was a women who had numb eyes and covered her mouth. This is a normal gesture for people who are thinking. What’s smart about this print is the texts all over the surface. Those may be something she had said to someone else, or something she got from others. The text saved us time, space, and energy of imagination, and also implied a little bit about what happened. It’s similar to Georges Rousse projecting his notes onto the walls and floors of the abandoned space that he took photographs of.

This is a diverse exhibitions of works in different artistic styles. It's like in those big museums because everyone should be able to find some pieces they love.