Plenty of lines populate "
Regarding Line" a show curated by Kirsty Peet at HCC Southwest campus art gallery. Straight, crooked, wavy, angular, curved, swirled, spiraled, faded, emergent, reflexive, intersected, overlapped, parallel, askew, thin, thick, black, grey, blue, white. Regarded individually, you'll find the building blocks of all art. Virtually, every thickness, shape, and solidity.
The lines compose drawings by John Adelman, Brent Fogt, and Kia Neill.
John Adelman's lines trace nails where they fall on a canvas not unlike chalk outlines of body at a crime scene. He traces them singularly but not simply a single nail. He traces thousands upon thousands of nails. And he keeps track of them as evident in the titles: "20,200 nails" and "8665 nails".
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| 8665 nails by John Adelman |
Adelman's process, as he recounted to me, is to drop the nails on a canvas, trace each nail where it falls, and then remove it. He drops them with intention. Sometimes single-ly, usually in bunches of tens or hundreds. Nonetheless, he drops them and then he faithfully records where they fall. While I was interviewing him, an HCC student asked him, "what does it mean?" He told her that he'd done enough work deconstructing and documenting the nails. She had to do the work of finding meaning in it.
Metaphysical ramifications be damned. It's a formalist rendition of chance.
A similar obsessive repetition inhabits the drawings of
Brent Fogt. Through the repetition and proximity of circles: imperfect, ovoid, oblong, his works coalesce into biomorphic abstractions. Each one conjures up an organic whole, which could be a snapshot of a galaxy or a microscopic colony of cells, a land mass viewed from the orbiting moon or a honeycombed slice of a beehive.
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| Tympanic Myst by Brent Fogt |
Don't get me wrong. At it's base, Fogt's work is doodling. Nevertheless, it's doodling that appears to be done with some great design in mind. Adelman joked that the formalist in him totally got Fogt's work. He gets the beauty of Fogt. However, I don't think you have to be a card-carrying formalist to appreciate these works. Divining why the line veers, curves, turns back on itself, or diverges toward the background, will busy or frustrate or craze you. The line does as it does. The middle school daydreamer in me is awed by the desultory maps that it creates.
Kia Neill's work in the show is just as labor intensive and just as subject to chance. Her drawings are acrylic, gouche, and ink mixtures that she manipulates on polypropylene paper. The resulting images are amorphous, translucent, and delicate.
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| Residual Form No. 27 by Kia Neill |
She explained to me that these drawings are an extension of an aesthetic project that she began in 2008 and which grew into room-size installations of psychedelic cave-caverns. I can only describe these installations as phantasmagoric pastoral (minus the sheep and the shepherds or fuck them a la William Burroughs). Typical of Neill's works during this period,
Grotto resembled what I imagine would be Ken Kesey's Terrarium, Jerry Garcia's walk-in closet, or your new-age aunt Julie's family room decor.
In this show, Neill continues her psychedelic pastoral progression. Abstract and atmospheric, these series of drawing could represent the spirits of (or the remains of) mythical creatures that inhabit her crystal caves.
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| Residual Form No.25 by Kia Neill |
Beginning all titles with "Residual Form No. ...," she applies a pseudo-scientific taxonomy that aligns the drawings with her most recent oeuvre. They form both a continuation of and provide a pseudo-scientific/archaeological reflection on her fantasy installations such as "Cave," "Grotto," and "Terrain."
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| Cave by Kia Neill |
As the title hints, "Regarding Line" doesn't have a grand narrative scheme. No heros, no villians, no cause celebres. Rather, it's about a concept, an abstraction, a platonic ideal. The show has a meditative quality to it that persists even among the greetings and giggles and gossip that go with art openings. A certain Zen pervades the space that Ms. Peet meticulously arranged. Despite the garrulousness, one can momentarily experience the raw curve and slant of the line.
* All pictures from HCC Southwest's gallery website, except for "Cave," which is from Kia Niell's website.
