“But in writing this book I found myself sadly hampered by the impossibility of drawing such diagrams as were necessary for my purpose; for of course, in our country of Flatland, there are no tablets but Lines, and no diagrams but Lines, all in one straight Line and only distinguishable by difference of size and brightness; so that, when I had finished my treatise… I could not feel certain that many would understand my meaning.” Flatland: a romance of many dimensions, Edwin Abbot Abbot
In a recent article for Bomb, Matthew J. Abrams highlights the innate qualities of Maggie Ogden’s raw canvases: “Most painters would desaturate a color through tinting or adding white, but Ogden’s monochromatic spectra are controlled through pure dilution, and in that way these painting are not just about lightness or dilution, but also erasure.” The roots of Ogden’s current approach to abstraction can be traced in Tarot (2014). This dichromatic, gestural painting is teeming with an accumulation of masked, cryptic notes. Like a page torn from a daily calendar, this earlier painting retains the minutia of her thought process. As Ogden’s work has shifted away from factual observation, these small memos have been replaced with motion, line and mark. Moving deeper into the fiction of the painting, Ogden’s work speaks to a mutable deletion through process.
This sensibility of transformative limitation is shared by Corydon Cowansage, Mary Laube, Amanda Martinez and Margaux Ogden, whose works comprise Portals. Operating within a spare vocabulary in which innately personal systems of logic displace empiricism and objectivity, these artists reference architectural spaces, personal artifacts and musical composition, both transcending and obfuscating their source material through pattern and repetition.
Corydon Cowansage’s Hole draws the viewer into the center of the painting through a series of concentric rectangles. One could be peering down a well or viewing a digitized, pixelated orifice. This observational relationship to the body is subverted through the lens of minimalism. Flattened perspective, optical radiance and anthropomorphized architecture animate her paintings, leaving the viewer floating over precarious walls and teetering stairs.
Mary Laube draws from such diverse sources as memorial artifacts and structures, traditional Korean adornment, dollhouses, and museum displays. Despite the flatness of parallel perspective, the layered surfaces of her paintings retain tactility. This interaction between likeness and object reflects a transference between corporeal and ethereal; analogous to the porosity between memory, imagination, and lived experience.
The sculptures of Amanda Martinez collapse the rigidity of archeological fragments with the softness of textile, while completely subverting and displacing one’s sense of scale. Mesmeric, monolithic forms are built from hand-carved, painted blocks of foam. Martinez’s early education in music plays a formative role in her artistic development; her work has been influenced by systems of musical composition and the visual translation of music in early music video technology. Testament from 2019 shows a latent relationship to music working within a more obscurely personal framework. In the absence of direct references, we are left with a purity of form in which the artist’s hand is subtly revealed.
In a recent article for Bomb, Matthew J. Abrams highlights the innate qualities of Maggie Ogden’s raw canvases: “Most painters would desaturate a color through tinting or adding white, but Ogden’s monochromatic spectra are controlled through pure dilution, and in that way these painting are not just about lightness or dilution, but also erasure.” The roots of Ogden’s current approach to abstraction can be traced in Tarot (2014). This dichromatic, gestural painting is teeming with an accumulation of masked, cryptic notes. Like a page torn from a daily calendar, this earlier painting retains the minutia of her thought process. As Ogden’s work has shifted away from factual observation, these small memos have been replaced with motion, line and mark. Moving deeper into the fiction of the painting, Ogden’s work speaks to a mutable deletion through process.
This sensibility of transformative limitation is shared by Corydon Cowansage, Mary Laube, Amanda Martinez and Margaux Ogden, whose works comprise Portals. Operating within a spare vocabulary in which innately personal systems of logic displace empiricism and objectivity, these artists reference architectural spaces, personal artifacts and musical composition, both transcending and obfuscating their source material through pattern and repetition.
Corydon Cowansage’s Hole draws the viewer into the center of the painting through a series of concentric rectangles. One could be peering down a well or viewing a digitized, pixelated orifice. This observational relationship to the body is subverted through the lens of minimalism. Flattened perspective, optical radiance and anthropomorphized architecture animate her paintings, leaving the viewer floating over precarious walls and teetering stairs.
Mary Laube draws from such diverse sources as memorial artifacts and structures, traditional Korean adornment, dollhouses, and museum displays. Despite the flatness of parallel perspective, the layered surfaces of her paintings retain tactility. This interaction between likeness and object reflects a transference between corporeal and ethereal; analogous to the porosity between memory, imagination, and lived experience.
The sculptures of Amanda Martinez collapse the rigidity of archeological fragments with the softness of textile, while completely subverting and displacing one’s sense of scale. Mesmeric, monolithic forms are built from hand-carved, painted blocks of foam. Martinez’s early education in music plays a formative role in her artistic development; her work has been influenced by systems of musical composition and the visual translation of music in early music video technology. Testament from 2019 shows a latent relationship to music working within a more obscurely personal framework. In the absence of direct references, we are left with a purity of form in which the artist’s hand is subtly revealed.
In the mid 19th century, painters of the Rocky Mountain School set out on government-funded expeditions to document the American West. Moved by such explorations, Thomas Moran painted “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,” providing the viewing public with a first glimpse of the unsettled frontier. Gradually, the West was revealed through the heightened sense of the sublime endemic to that artistic movement, stimulating the public imagination. Tourism increased, funding the development of the railroad and further driving westward expansion.
Prior to advanced methods of photographing space, 20th century artists such as Chesley Bonestell helped visualize the cosmos. The painstaking task of telescopic observation often resulted in over-rendered images which verged on abstraction, unconstructive in evoking the grand scope of the heavens. Collaborating with astronomers, Bonestell translated observational data into paintings of habitable worlds. Starting in the 1950s, National Geographic began to publish his hyperrealistic renderings of the solar system. These images were instrumental in developing the culture of the space race, eventually leading to the first man on the moon.
In the 21st century, the definition of frontier expands to accommodate extra-solar planets, hidden dimensions, and the quantum universe. Frontiers considers the immediate threshold preceding experiences of the unknown, and explores the varied ways artists draw from what is understood to envisage the otherworldly. As we assimilate new bodies of knowledge, we make sense of strangeness through familiar systems. Guided by intuition, Matthew F. Fisher, Pete Schulte, Mary Laube, Mike Nudelman, Kristy Luck and Ian Etter allude to past cognizance while visualizing new horizons.
Prior to advanced methods of photographing space, 20th century artists such as Chesley Bonestell helped visualize the cosmos. The painstaking task of telescopic observation often resulted in over-rendered images which verged on abstraction, unconstructive in evoking the grand scope of the heavens. Collaborating with astronomers, Bonestell translated observational data into paintings of habitable worlds. Starting in the 1950s, National Geographic began to publish his hyperrealistic renderings of the solar system. These images were instrumental in developing the culture of the space race, eventually leading to the first man on the moon.
In the 21st century, the definition of frontier expands to accommodate extra-solar planets, hidden dimensions, and the quantum universe. Frontiers considers the immediate threshold preceding experiences of the unknown, and explores the varied ways artists draw from what is understood to envisage the otherworldly. As we assimilate new bodies of knowledge, we make sense of strangeness through familiar systems. Guided by intuition, Matthew F. Fisher, Pete Schulte, Mary Laube, Mike Nudelman, Kristy Luck and Ian Etter allude to past cognizance while visualizing new horizons.
For Wittgenstein, green is not a secondary color, but one of four primary colors. As we move from yellow to blue, we reach a point that is markedly green, not a blue that’s yellower or a yellow that’s bluer. As he notes, “For me, green is one special way-station from the colored path from blue to yellow, and red is another.” The paintings of Iowa City based painter John Dilg live fully within this anomalous primary, a truth both elemental and compound.
Dilg begins his paintings with a sienna ground and charcoal drawing. Thin, successive layers of opaque colors are then scumbled over the surface of the canvas. The warmth of the underpainting cuts through a restrained palette of cool yellows, blues and greens. This method of layering effectively ages the painting and the resultant image always lies just beyond reach, existing in a fog that proves the spectrum from green to blue to be infinitely reducible. And it is in reduction that Dilg speaks of memory. The modest scale, intimate touch and simple imagery convince us of his sincerity as he constructs “images (that) both recollect and recompose important memories that, though personal in premise, could be applicable to anyone.” Dilg’s paintings are a peculiar recounting of stories of the land he lives in, memories both deeply personal and collective.
As an avid collector, Dilg has an impressive reservoir of paintings from untrained artists. Imagery from this collection is woven into his work. For example, some paintings begin with imagery from a found painting that is studied, reworked in small thumbnail sketches and transferred to the canvas once it has taken shape. This process transforms the original image into a newly formed icon by releasing it of the weight of its own history. His personal history is mixed with that of his sources, all of which are stripped down to an essential quality that strives for the archetypal. Dilg’s convincingly personal paintings tell a universal story based in multiple histories.
Fourth Primary consists of eight paintings that highlight the clandestine role autobiography plays in Dilg’s work. His story is almost exclusively told through reductive, iconographic landscapes. The world reflected back in the Claude glass, a tool once used by traditional landscape painters, is highly reduced in both color and detail. This reduction correlates to Dilg’s way of processing imagery. He uses painting to capture small moments that are both distinct and archetypal. Dilg’s personal story is central to his work, but rendered indistinct through blending it with his sources.
Dilg begins his paintings with a sienna ground and charcoal drawing. Thin, successive layers of opaque colors are then scumbled over the surface of the canvas. The warmth of the underpainting cuts through a restrained palette of cool yellows, blues and greens. This method of layering effectively ages the painting and the resultant image always lies just beyond reach, existing in a fog that proves the spectrum from green to blue to be infinitely reducible. And it is in reduction that Dilg speaks of memory. The modest scale, intimate touch and simple imagery convince us of his sincerity as he constructs “images (that) both recollect and recompose important memories that, though personal in premise, could be applicable to anyone.” Dilg’s paintings are a peculiar recounting of stories of the land he lives in, memories both deeply personal and collective.
As an avid collector, Dilg has an impressive reservoir of paintings from untrained artists. Imagery from this collection is woven into his work. For example, some paintings begin with imagery from a found painting that is studied, reworked in small thumbnail sketches and transferred to the canvas once it has taken shape. This process transforms the original image into a newly formed icon by releasing it of the weight of its own history. His personal history is mixed with that of his sources, all of which are stripped down to an essential quality that strives for the archetypal. Dilg’s convincingly personal paintings tell a universal story based in multiple histories.
Fourth Primary consists of eight paintings that highlight the clandestine role autobiography plays in Dilg’s work. His story is almost exclusively told through reductive, iconographic landscapes. The world reflected back in the Claude glass, a tool once used by traditional landscape painters, is highly reduced in both color and detail. This reduction correlates to Dilg’s way of processing imagery. He uses painting to capture small moments that are both distinct and archetypal. Dilg’s personal story is central to his work, but rendered indistinct through blending it with his sources.
