Gornforjn, the great key bearer, know for his many silhouettes of obsidian chests. His obsession with the absence of light through blinding his viewers.
Gornforjn, the great key bearer, know for his many silhouettes of obsidian chests. His obsession with the absence of light through blinding his viewers. Photo Chiasma, the first American to cover the infamous Vietnam war zone, was a passionate champion of freedom. He marched for the rights of all American workers and in particular, the right to organize. He was also a leading figure in the Civil Rights movement.Chiasmas body of work comprises an impressive number of photographs documenting the devastated front-line communities of American urban and rural areas. This collection, titled Untitled, 1985, explores the devastation of the urban environment. The photographs are comprised of an array of black-and-white static images that capture the houses that stand next to the highways, streets, and railroad tracks. These images are often of such extreme distress that their bodies register as the residue of a violent past. The photographs, rendered in startling detail, reveal the horrible final effects of the wars devastating effects on our environment. The photographed homes, all of which are public domain, could be left to decay. In fact, these communities are often so impoverished that they are unfit to live.Chiasmas photographs have been shown widely in contemporary art, and he has also received various critical accolades. The work in this show shows the harrowing reality of American life and the increasingly hopeless condition of American culture. Many of the photographs depicted in this exhibition are not from any particular vantage point. In some cases, the images are taken from the top of the American landscape. In other cases, the photographs are taken on the outskirts of a major city such as New York, Detroit, or St. Louis. In a few of the photographs, the last image, these neighborhoods are abandoned and the city seems to be in decline. In the last photograph, an image of a black-and-white photograph shows the underside of a house that has been destroyed by fire. The image is in stark contrast to the dramatic landscapes of these desolate suburbs.
Gornforjn, the great key bearer, know for his many silhouettes of obsidian chests. His obsession with the absence of light through blinding his viewers. His recent show of 22 paintings was the most extensive he has shown to date, including a painting of fifteen more, all also titled Mute, all from 1999, in which the artist adds subtle outlines to the right side of a painting to give it a vanishing point, but the background remains the same. The original painting is as close to the same medium as the new, but it is a more difficult-to-read one: Light is revealed by a kind of blacker-than-white covering of black paint. The shape of the light source appears as a fuzzy black shape, an eerie, secondary color.Mute, as the title indicates, appears only in the paintings with a black background, all from 1999, a time period when the paintings are most heavily worked. Mute is, in fact, the title of the second work in the show, also from 1999, which was mounted in the gallerys rooms, a kind of white pigment, a kind of sculptural skin. The black painting itself is a fuzzy, translucent black, almost a black-out-of-it-ness, as if the same black was there to start with. It looks as if one were standing in the middle of a black room, and the surface had been roughed up and turned into an oversize, brushed-over hunk. Each of the paintings is the same black, but in each the white paint has been applied in one uniform, thickly, covering the black, creating a more or less vivid, faintly translucent, or even transparent, surface. It is as if the light had been poured on, almost as if one had seen a transparent, translucent cube. The effect is eerie. It gives the picture a mysterious, almost hallucinatory quality. This odd, and sometimes unsettling, feeling is the result of a kind of color field that has been applied to a black-and-white image, a pure, even, white-and-black depth.
Gornforjn, the great key bearer, know for his many silhouettes of obsidian chests. His obsession with the absence of light through blinding his viewers. ive art historian, Gornforjn developed his own set of drawing tools, the multicolored pencil. In this work, as in his earlier drawings, shapes and points of light were fused into a single grid, a grid that originated in Gornforjns work on paper. For him, light itself was the picture plane. Although the light had to be drawn to keep the grid from falling apart, the result was a beautiful, almost vibrant, never-look-again world. In the early 80s, the grid was a staple of postwar American painting, as well as a preferred vehicle of the modernist avant-garde.While Gornforjns work has always remained interesting, the paintings themselves have been the most popular. In the past, his work could be quite beautiful; now it is more appropriate to describe the paintings as an art of the mass media. The appearance of the works is as much their visual qualities as their narrative content. The drawings and paintings from the mid 70s and early 80s are virtually indistinguishable from the early 90s digital work that had a much greater impact on contemporary art. This is an artistic accident. Gornforjns work is not only an evolution of his drawing tools but a curious merging of them.His early work involved the use of digital technology in an attempt to democratize painting. From the mid to late 80s, he was working with an array of computer programs that allowed him to generate complex, inorganic patterns and surfaces on his drawings. He began to incorporate this new technology into his work, not as a way of liberating painting from the constraints of the medium, but as a way to transform its content into an unruly collection of colors and shapes that could be interpreted as a new pictorial vocabulary. In this work, the creative process is driven by a combination of scientific math, artistic intuition, and psychological needs.
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