|Guadalupe Martinez
|Jasmine Reimer
\Anna Wood
When
has abstraction ever been outside of our motivations, gestures or bodies?
The decidedly precarious meeting place of the materials in Anatomize Obfuscation are points of
convergence that we can relate to as easily as the vernacular objects, and
contexts we engage with while walking home from our nearest grocer. Our
appreciation for formal and aesthetic relationships come from that same place:
It comes from the rear - from relationships that we can move from and remember:
the colloquial aesthetic experience. The expanded definition of this
phrase discusses the aesthetic conversations directed towards the mundane and
ubiquitous. Be they objects, materials or gestures they lie in the realm of charged everyday.
The Commons is proud to present Anatomize Obfuscation, an exhibition of three female artists, based
in Vancouver BC, whose works showcase a diverse array of “liberating” gestures
for the mundane through performance, sculpture, collage and painting. Setup initially as
a living system, this exhibition hopes to expose aesthetics at ground level
while maintaining performative elements that reverse strict formal
preoccupations. The activation of certain work, or sites, ignites an intimacy
with the given materials through juxtaposition and reordering. Guadalupe Martinez and Jasmine Reimer leave
objects exposed – panting and stressed – where they reintegrate into common
systems of organization used for standardized materials. Stacked or leaning
pieces of wood, cinderblocks, and foam of all varieties act as base material
for their sculptures in order for this vernacular language to be outlined and
expanded. Anna Wood engages with this kind of colloquial experimentation
through surface. She renders with paint, collage and other two-dimensional mark
makers. All three artists articulate a kind of deconstruction of the everyday
through their interplay with material use value, form and colour.
Can life be viewed
as an aesthetic experience (like that of a video game or construction site)? Anatomize Obfuscation organizes the spaces
that the employed materials occupy in ways that are as vernacular, and
beautiful, as an early cup of Joe or successful birth. Martinez, Reimer and Wood use ostensibly banal
materials to
speak of the common object as being charged with aesthetic and social
potential, aligning their humble nature within society through their formal
gesture.
Anatomize Obfuscation opens up to the
work of Guadalupe Martinez where, through its transformation over the duration
of the exhibition, her installation seems to cycle through moments of expiration.
Martinez involves herself with re-ordering a series of cinderblocks while
weaving gold fabric through and around this structural material, alluding to
the modular nature of her compositions. She employs objects that allude to
participatory and cooperative action, or reaction, and fosters this through the
possible prerogative of her installations whether they resemble a construction
site, banner or blockade. Martinez’s ostensibly impenetrable structures are
quite illusive. Forms of social and physical architecture remain attached to
her materials, whereby the interruption of space facilitates an object-ground
relationship as illustrated through Study for a Compound Sentence (2013). The way in which Martinez employs
materials and moments of suspended activity calls upon the uncanny, bringing
the anxious and flux body back into the work.
Similarly, Jasmine Reimer uses
surrealist gestures that seem to emerge from the very edges of her sculptures.
These externally located objects are not embedded, but adorned in a way that
seems closer to sensation. The body knows when it is spoken to. They emerge
from pieces of foam, wood or found objects, as in Finger Fence (2012), pulling elements of the mundane from the body,
the domestic and urban space into her sculptures. The works frame each other as
they wipe away or meld into the architecture of the gallery. Reimer’s
sculptures seem to mutually reference a presumptive knowledge surrounding the
everyday object, but this knowledge becomes negated through the qualities that
formalism brings to the mundane. Her quiet sculptures highlight minute
relationships between objects and speak volumes of their material tensions as
well as their overall placement across the series of work.
Wood
plays on the unadulterated space of the canvas, using methods of cutting and
pasting common maps alongside paint and ink. Their compositional interplay is
perhaps best described to be at “street level”. Not that they fit into street-arts
but their forms and materials reference a given site as well as their external
world. These
marks come from our surrounding architecture as well as what we have felt
through the last half century of painting. Wood’s Untitled series asks for the same level
of engagement as when we walk through a city that has been fabricated before
our arrival or inevitable contribution, imposing standardized marks of
abstraction.
These three artists present the
everyday in a state between beginning and completing: a space of emergence – of
process – of coming into being. Disciplines, ideologies and materials
cross-fertilize in Anatomize Obfuscation to form a
re-interpretation of these now reified objects. Looking at the exhibition space
as a collaborative template, it oscillates between moments of construction and
deconstruction as the everyday becomes aesthetic information to manipulate. Not only does the nature of
collaboration as well as Martinez’s installation speak of the animate figure, Anatomize Obfuscation also cements the
space of abstraction as being made by and for the body. This aesthetic tendency
is of the vernacular and remains to be a latent motivation for architecture,
design and art. The enigmatic tendencies of the surreal and uncanny manifest
just as graphic lines and formal materials work alongside our bodies.
Tobin
Gibson