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 | AUGUST 2008 "True Nature," Curator Victor Maldonado TRUE NATURE – Five artists at Beppu Wiarda Gallery. Victor Maldonado, Curator. "What is the true nature of contemporary fine art today? Providing an answer to that conceptually and aesthetically complex question is precisely what this group show is thematically organized around. Each of the five artists in the exhibit model the kind of expanded means and resilient sensibility of conceptualism, installation and media literacy. In her small, acidic abstractions, Nika Blasser deploys a lacework of drawn and painted worlds that allude to the cellular wonders beneath microscopes. The volume and flow of her black and whites easily slip in and out of scale. Ceding attention to the precision of control in the form of pinprick burns amidst flowing pools of a galactic ether. That same tension is called upon in Kim McKenna’s lush paintings fusing the medieval skills and language of renaissance painting to represent the tricks and fakery of contemporary culture. McKenna’s project is to illuminate the malleable support of the image, to be compositionally careful and playfully critical about beauty which today is less a universal goal than another means toward personal and mass control. For Melanie Nakaue beauty and recognition are also the subjects that her digital prints and sculpture encounter. Nakaue uses a constructed folk language to break apart the import/export culture of Hawaiian agricultural workers. She also problematizes what the true nature of the authentic, in a global context, really means. She unveils the spiritual fracture that colonialism forced on the people it encountered. Identity, its recognition, delay and possible misidentification is what Rebecca Steele’s work is about. She is interested in a kind of art world forensics to get at the soul of her work. Hers is a knowledge gained through method and process. As in Blasser’s use of paired down aesthetics, here also black and white, Steel forces the eye to locate the work within a commercial setting. She is both questioning what the reality her work can present while leaving her fingerprint within the conventional framework of fine art. Working within the conventional framework of art is what Kelly Rauer’s studio practice is about. Pushing what fine art can be, in an era after conceptualism, has permeated all the arts, Rauer pushes easy notions of drawing and installation forward. Visual and verbal slips are at the heart of her vision that begins as meditative writing sessions that create words with a life of their own. If it is the true nature of art to challenge and propel our notion of the mainstream how do we understand the logic of phenomena and design that delineate our 21st Century landscape? It is through continued contemplation of the innovative frameworks around which each of the artists’ entangled notions of convention, fine art traditions, concerns of materiality and form, the appropriate and inappropriateness of images in mass consumer culture and the stagecraft that modern representation allows our eyes to see." CLICK ON IMAGE TO SEE SHOW. |