A Three-Artist Show at Allyn Gallup Shows the Breadth of Contemporary Abstraction
December 11th, 2008 by Cooper Levey-Baker in Arts, Editor's Desk, News, Sarasota-Manatee
"Palace" by Dolores Coe
Ed. note: This piece, by Kevin Costello, will appear in next week’s Creative Loafing.
After 100 years of evolution, abstract art continues to nourish our emotional and intellectual needs in ways representational art simply cannot. Abstraction is an invisible vessel of the imagination that pours out subterranean truths about the nature of human experience that representationalism can only reveal, but not explore. Abstract painting is visual poetry - oblique and enigmatic, circumscribed in its effect only by the limitations of the creative force and the physical dexterity of its creator.
The three artists currently on view at Allyn Gallup Contemporary Art - Dolores Coe, Carla Poindexter and Josette Urso - give evidence of the expressive plurality of abstraction. Each in their own way use conceptual strategies based on felt experience to fuse the complexity of the modern world into concise statements of line, color and form.
Dolores Coe does this by “slamming together very different elements such as photography, acrylic and oil painting” in order to create fictitious vistas. Her “mirage series” is based “on actual photographs [taken] while driving,” which blur the line between recognizable image and abstract composition. She paints out the forms or adds elements to the photograph with acrylic paint before unifying the image with oils. The effect is that of a luminous landscape dissolving and evolving at the same time.
“In my Las Vegas paintings,” says Coe “I have constructed an iconic space… I’m interested in memory and the density of experience.” The artist took “hundreds and hundreds of photographs” to create the images. “In Las Vegas, I was captivated by the edge between things… Edges are rich places to work, like the artificial environment of Las Vegas and the outlying desert.”
For Coe, the space, the boundary between photography and painting is itself an edge. “I’m interested in implied narratives … in constructing scenes.” Her “carnival series” looks at fairgrounds at night; here she is interested in “emptied spaces, stage sets and abstract elements coming from light and movement.”
Carla Poindexter, meanwhile, is interested in nanotechnology and string theory, two divergent fields of physics. Nanotechnology is a field whose theme is the control of matter at an atomic and molecular scale, while string theory emerged from theoretical physics in the 1980s. It suggests that the universe is made up of multiple dimensions, possibly up to 10.
Poindexter’s paintings are animated compositions of shapes that suggest everything from DNA helixes to toys and candy bars spinning in earth-toned infinities. “I’m interested in how we can make mathematical principles poetic,” she says. “I arrived at the present work by first getting interested in root and leaf systems. I would go and buy a potted plant and in the studio pull it out of the pot and draw the root system, the mechanics of its spiral.”
She also possesses a passionate interest in music and mentions what a different experience it is to hear “music people talk about painting” in contrast to the art cognoscenti. “One hears terms such as tone, rhythm and harmony used in a completely different way… I think abstract painting and music go hand-in-hand.”
The third arist featured at Gallup, Josette Urso, just moved into a new studio in Bushwick, N.Y. - an industrial area in Brooklyn, just beyond Williamsburg - after living in Chelsea for 18 years. “It’s an old renovated knitting factory. My studio is on the roof looking down onto the landscape. Lots of pigeons… Many of my neighbors have homing pigeons. In the Allyn Gallup show are views of Brooklyn from this new studio. The studio has big windows, beautiful light… I chose the space because of the amazing view. It is material for my paintings.”
Her abstracted cityscapes fuse muted tones and a silvery sheen, and suggest soft geometric structures like netting, melting in an all-encompassing light. “It strikes me as interesting and unconscious that I’m in this old knitting factory and that in my new paintings the strokes of paint are knitted together into existence.”
The artist is interested in what this new environment will do for her work. In the past, she painted on a relatively small scale. “The big windows and view have made me move to much larger canvases. I’m interested in moment-to-moment feeling in my work. I’ve been reflecting on the possibilities of small powerful paintings and large intimate ones.”
Three artists, three visions, three exploration of what abstraction means a century after it was born.
New Work
Runs through Jan. 3, Allyn Gallup Contemporary Art, 1419 Fifth St., Sarasota, 366-2093 or miramararts.com. Hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat.
December 11th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
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