Link to images from the exhibition

In his poem, A Suite of Appearances, Mark Strand posits that, instead of trying to recreate an accurate and detailed account of scenes or moments past, which, he believes, “only darkens our sense of what happened”, it is “better to hope for the merest reminder, a spectral glimpse”. A glimpse is inviting, alluring, suggestive of something greater. A glimpse empowers a viewer with an agency to observe, communicate, conjecture, question -- to become mentally and emotionally engaged.  A glimpse is also fleeting – concealing as quickly as it reveals – leaving a viewer to struggle between the real and the imagined or, as Strand puts it, between what is “there but not there”.

The drawings, collages, photographs, sculptures and installations in a spectral glimpse offer viewers entrée into imaginative, psychological, ethereal worlds within works. Through the use of spectral devices, such as auras, aberrations, and shadows, the artists are able to draw viewers into the works; however, each stops short of creating any recognizable or exacting representation of a scene or even of providing any true guidance. Viewers are left with more questions than answers. And while each work is unique to the mind and imaginings of each individual artist – they all act as triggers for personal perceptual, cognitive or emotional responses on the part of viewers.

David Dupuis’s intimate drawings waver between representation and abstraction resulting in eerie imaginative dreamscapes. As if drawn from a hemorrhage of memory, the meticulous graphite detailing of barren, almost lunar-like, landscapes become awash with chaotic colorful scribbles and radiant aura-like renderings in blue colored pencil. Into a few of these surrealist scenes, Dupuis inserts elements of collage, often glossy disembodied eyes. Staring out of the drawings, the hypnotic eyes entice viewers, inviting them to not only discern the familiar from the fantastical in the small-scale drawings, but also to conjure their own scenes, with all the associated feelings and symbols, that are lurking deep within their personal memories.

While Brad Biancardi begins his paintings with recognizable images – specific apartments, galleries or even pop culture references, each tends to become more and more veiled as he adds layers upon layers of abstraction. Lines shoot out symmetrically from vanishing points across the canvases of his newest series, patterning a futuristic network in horizontal, vertical and diagonal flashes of color.  Through the process of building-up the layers of paint and obfuscating the initial images, Biancardi visually explores psychological and emotional attachments and responses to specific places or things, and how these pent-up responses change when viewed through the lens of memory and time.  In the work created specifically for this exhibition, Biancardi forgoes his usual paint and canvas, and instead creates a large chalk floor drawing that is “poised only to be dissolved”.  Viewers literally enter and navigate the picture plane, blurring and erasing the work until nothing remains.

While Biancardi’s paintings start with images of constructed spaces or objects, photographer Adam Ekberg focuses on the natural, and, more specifically in his Aberration series, on forests. Emphasizing the details and particularities of specific forests is not as paramount to Ekberg as the notion of these natural environments serving as a sort of place of spiritual or mystical presence. This is manifest in the huge ringed aberrations of the camera lens flares in each photograph. Through a simple optical gesture involving a lens and sunlight, Ekberg captures astonishing images that, while not there in actuality for the naked eye to seek out and spot in the woods, suggest an ethereal presence and connectedness that is often felt in natural settings.

Lucy Pullen similarly employs light to suggest a sense of surprise and sublime. Illumination in her work is typically the effect of her investigations in the production and control of anarchic energy and reflectivity. In The Northern Lights, colored light spills across an acoustic tile-lined ceiling of a music studio. Serving as visual representations of the sound and energy that emanate and reverberate from the assortment of instruments in this communal jam space, the glow of the spot lights’ cast mimics the electromagnetism and the attendant otherworldly colored light display of the aurora borealis. The resultant image is of a quiet communion between the (super)natural and the man-made, hinting at larger connections of energies elsewhere that “cannot be seen or explained”. 

The blurring between the real and the artificial within manufactured spaces likewise plays a key role in the work of Bari Ziperstein.  While conceptually anchored in the architectural history of Los Angeles and the effect of consumerism on urban and suburban landscapes, Ziperstein’s collage, sculptural works and photographs effectively draw attention to the way environments are designed and constructed.  In her work, monumental obtuse foam core and plaster constructions intrude and overcrowd bedrooms, kitchens, and dens challenging physical and psychological perceptions of model domiciles and disorientating how its inhabitants are meant to interact within such spaces. And while Ziperstein’s work humorously references modernist and minimalist tenets and tropes made popular in the mid-twentieth century (industrial, monochromatic, economic use of materials, utilitarian, utopian), it also offers an absurdist, if not bleak, illusionary peek into a future where consumerist desire for the idealized dwellings promoted in design and nesting magazines runs with wild abandon.

Much like Ziperstein, Leyla Cárdenas investigates and documents architectural and environmental transformations of spaces. For Cárdenas, however, it is the surfaces of old, abandoned buildings and areas of urban decay, with the accumulated layers of history and site-specific particularities, which serve as the impetus for her reductive sculptural arrangements.  The peeled fragments of paint, pinned and mounted like archeological specimens in her Record #3 (recollection from 14th Street house), serve as material testimonies to this specific space’s past inhabitants and the imprinted traces of time. Displaced and overlapping in the installation, the suspended traces throw ethereal shadows blurring the lines between presence and absence, stasis and motion, past and present.

For Ariana Page Russell, skin serves as a forum for the visceral as well as documentation for the transition of passing time. In her work, external ephemeral manifestations on skin evidence internal tension. The private is made public, if only for brief moments. For her new installation, a patterned window and wall piece, translucent and pastel-hued, upon closer inspection seems to blush, blister.  The walls are anthropomorphic.  Dressed in skin swatches that record fleeting vulnerabilities and emotions, the surfaces in the gallery space mimic those of the body’s skin– fading, flaking, sagging and peeling over time.  Not necessarily sorrowful, celebratory or cautionary, Russell provides a glimpse into a process of decay that is to come to everyone and everything.

About the curator:  In 2004-05, Jim O'Donnell served as a curator at Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) in Seattle.  During this time he curated group exhibitions, including Wish (with Miranda Lichtenstein, Kelly Mark, Rashid Johnson, and Jillian Mcdonald) and co-curated Domicile: A Sense of Place (with Zeng Hao, Margarita Cabrera, Rhonda Weppler, Harrell Fletcher, Marc Dombrosky, and Isidro Blasco).  He also organized solo projects in the space, such as Tivon Rice (Philo’s Cave) and Chad Wentzel (I Believe I Can Fly) and invited and worked with guest curators, such as artists Ken Lum and Ernesto Pujol and curator Maura Reilly (Brooklyn Museum of Art).