Pieces: Compositions of Accumulation

“Pieces: Compositions of Accumulation” is a group show focusing on four artists working within self defined systems of repetition and accumulation.  Each artist speaks of the process of painting as, in some way, a response to modern life and the need to make sense of current trends in society and art, through the medium of paint.  The act of accumulating is a means of assembling the disparate facets of life; creating new contexts of meaning through selection, placement and orientation.  These artists are not simply engaging in obsessive-compulsive mark-making, they are exorcizing a need to gather, arrange, and organize.  The works evince an inner need to order and re-contextualize meaning and message in an effort to gain a broader understanding of the randomness of everyday life.

MOLLY BRIGGS presents “a surface layered with illusions of space: physical space, historical space and the space between distinct yet entwined areas of human inquiry.”  Her paintings are ethereal works created with vellum, paint and ink.  Broad strokes and patterns are used amid translucent shades of light blue, purple or silver to convey a sense of buoyancy and transition.  Subtle shifts of foreground/background result from the application of paint on top of and underneath a layer of vellum, producing the illusion of weightlessness.  Briggs states, “My work always comes out of an interest in how things are made, including objects and art, as well as natural and man-made systems in the world.  I am interested in the theory of evolution as an analogy for thinking about how art is made. The theory has undergone conceptual transformation since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, influencing spheres of thought unrelated to the physical sciences.  To roughly characterize the shift: the theory was once taken as evidence of life’s innate drive toward higher orders of consciousness or even to society and morality. Currently, biological complexity is more likely to be understood as a consequence of expanding biological diversity – and diversity can also contract, and then expand again in a different way, which disposes of the concept of a linear progression of betterment.  These interpretations can be compared to opposing paradigms of how art and meaning are made – by a clearly purposeful process, versus an organic, multi-directional process.  The paintings represent the abstract, multi-layered experience of thinking.”  Molly Briggs received her M.F.A. from Northwestern University, in Evanston, IL, and her B.F.A. from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. 

MARCELYN McNEIL has ceded a certain amount of control to the materiality of the paint, allowing it to inform the process and the final result.  Her paintings are composed of stripes, bands, drips and streaks of color applied in such a way as to disguise the mark of her hand.  She states “In the current climate where the manipulation of new technologies, youth culture, digital imaging, and video demand attention, I am invested in the low-tech potential of paint, how it engages history, and functions as a visceral object today.  I approach painting analytically, considering formal issues and employ systems in application that mediate the process.  These systems which include using plum lines, squeeze bottles, pouring and taping methods, while calculated, allow for slippage during making.  In finished works it is a visual experience, visceral response to material, and deviation from the predictable that continually inform why I paint.  I consider these works expansive linear fields, where the material is stretched exposing its abilities, vulnerabilities, beauty and abject qualities.  Marcelyn McNeil received her M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and her B.F.A. from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, in Portland, OR.

MARTINA NEHRLING has developed an extensive visual vocabulary based on the immediacy of the brushstroke and the flexibility of color.  Her paintings are composed of short vertical or horizontal marks banded and grouped together across the picture plane. “The relationships of the brushstrokes to one another and the sense of their accumulation are determined by color, size, scale, position, consistency, and opacity.  Such formal concerns are the means with which I investigate the multiple layers of order and disorder around us and thereby accept, embrace, even celebrate it.” These all-over compositions are carefully controlled and executed but have not sacrificed spontaneity.  Nehrling notices how the eye seeks out patterns but can easily be interrupted by particular color relationships or a shift in scale.  “We are accustomed to categorizing and prioritizing what we see, but these paintings take a cue from color itself and resist settling on a precise referent.  In fact, due to the slipperiness of color and the multiple independent brushstrokes, my images may spontaneously reorganize themselves.”  Martina Nehrling received her M.F.A. from the University of Chicago and her B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

JACKIE TILESTON’s paintings are rich combinations of tone, texture, gesture, and control.  Using oil paint, dry pigment, enamel, along with collage and transfer items, she incorporates diverse elements from both eastern and western aesthetics, creating a visual metaphor for her multi-cultural upbringing.  Tileston states, “My work comes out of an interest in painting as a language in which invention, analysis, and the stuff of paint can work in concert with each other. The paintings and drawings feed off of the history of abstraction, physics, Hindu deity images, Chinese landscape, the computer, and other sources.   There is a constant flux between empty and full, atmospheric and graphic, abstract and figurative, quiet and psychedelic.  The current dialogue around beauty, a passion for color, and a belief in the relevance of tactility and transcendence also informs the work.  This medley of sources is orchestrated to create or reconstruct a world within the paintings in which a new kind of sense is made –a world in which the beautiful and the absurd, the sacred and the mundane cooperate.  I think of my paintings as a form of empire building, a heterotopia in which contraries are put to work, knitting the world together in a kind of visual globalism.”  Jackie Tileston received her M.F.A. from Indiana University, Bloomington, and her B.A. Fine Arts, from Yale University, New Haven, CT.