Life Transmissions: An Endless Cycle

LIFE TRANSMISSIONS

Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University
October 6 – November 2, 2014

Chapman University's Guggenheim Gallery has been transformed into a stage that presents  the works of eleven artists: Bas Jan Ader, Sarah Bostwick, Joshua Callaghan, Megan Daalder, Karl Haendel, Mary Kelly, John Mills, Jed Ochmanek, Gina Osterloh, Robert Rauschenberg, and Peter Wu. Collectively, their creations connote a cyclical nature which permeates art and life itself--perhaps inextricably.

As I walk into the gallery space--soaking up the visuals coming at me from all angles--I feel at peace. Although surrounded by an array of visual stimuli, it all seems to be working together to bring forward a certain message. So, I continue forward and take a closer look at each artwork--letting their impact percolate.

A massive cloth hangs in the anterior corner of the gallery space, catching my attention. In Joshua Callaghan’s piece, Focus, he imprints in charcoal a life-sized Ford Focus on a piece of 20’ x 26’ linen. The artist takes a mechanical object, the function of which is manifest in its three-dimensionality, and takes away its function by spitting it out in a different dimension. In the process, he alters its purpose. Without its power, the car fades into the background, as a literal flat backdrop for the energy in the surrounding space. A car literally has a transmission—the mechanism that transmits power from the engine to its wheels. The transmission gives the wheels power, and the human driver reigns supreme; Callaghan's entertainment of this literal and very conceptual idea is attention-grabbing and intriguing, all the while visually interesting. 

On another wall, hangs three of Gina Osterloh's pieces: on three colored acrylic panels, she creates photographs that mimic infinity walls—the staple of classic pictorial space since the Renaissance. She has painted wonky grids on the panels, thereby controlling the viewer’s perspective and even distorting it. By distorting or changing the form of the visual transmission of spatial reality, the artist alters our understanding of the very backdrop of our visual fabric and realm. 

John Mills, his painting on the wall besides Osterlohs',  simulates scribbles into imagery, or verbal language into visual language, in his piece MD 20/20—perhaps the most classical of the exhibition in his reference to early modernist vocabulary. The oil and graphite work is a meditation on language. Filled with loopy, curly shapes or signs, it evokes a resemblance to letters. In viewing this piece, one may be inspired to reflect on his or her own response to the written word as well as the surrounding visible world. It is a catalyst for personal discovery and the cycle of life. 

At the center and heart of the exhibition, Mary Kelly presents motherhood in Post-Partum Document: Introduction, from 1973.  She displays her son’s wool nappy liners stained with remnants of bodily excretions—mucus, urine, saliva—all of which have been transferred from the infant’s body to the cloth, now art. Kelly’s literal creation, her child, transferred signs of its existence to the piece which explores the relationship between artist and son during formative moments of linguistic development. During this period, Kelly simultaneously is experiencing a sense of loss, once again representing a chain of transmittance in multiple senses. She incites life, the baby produces indexical traces of its existence, and the mother creates art with those remnants, which in turn influence others. As a viewer, we too are affected by this piece; we may go on to create, act, or interact—perhaps with a new perspective. Here, Kelly has chronicled the chain reaction that lies at the core of the exhibition.

Jed Ochmanek relies heavily on the sun, just as humans do for survival, for his artistic process in achieving his work, Polarity. Putting down a layer of oil paint each day on site, Ochmanek relied on the harsh sunlight of Joshua Tree to expedite the drying of hundreds of layers of thinned oils that comprise his works. He has created a sort of gradient, which almost seems to display the visible light spectrum: characteristic of the very element which defines the process and enables the creation. The result is a rusty, moody atmosphere that reflects how the external forces erode the surface of the paintings, channeling classical abstraction. The artist builds life on aluminum and lets the world give it new life.

Sarah Bostwick’s Norm explores life after dark in a small, white plaster piece. Hanging on the bleak gallery wall, this piece might at first be disregarded. However, when you wait for the shadows to emerge its depth and dimensionality will jump out at you. Bostwick’s casting and carving process has resulted in a precise architectural relief of the Norm’s Restaurant sign, surrounded by unaffected white space that we read as “empty.” Just as a gallery wall could appear bleak and empty, the shadows of what is hung on it are what give it life. Norms is a source of life, and an instrument for transmission--of food, hope, light during darkness. Bostwick's piece translates this in a compelling, subtle fashion.

Two videos are included in the exhibition: one by Megan Daalder and one by Bas Jan Ader. Pictured on a television set, Ader’s 1971 silent video, Nightfall, shows the artist in a garage—an interesting mixture of indoor and outdoor environments. We are not sure if it is nighttime outside, or if the nightfall exists only within the confines of the artist’s consciousness. The action consists of Ader struggling to lift a block of concrete, which he attempts to balance with one hand before dropping it onto a luminescent light bulb laying on the floor, and then the second—crushing them and eliminating the light they convey. It appears that the artist deliberately tries to portray a sense of personal strength and control throughout the process of willingly surrounding himself by total darkness. We don't really know his purpose; maybe he'd rather be blind to his burdens than for them to remain apparent; or maybe the hopelessness that accompanies the weight of earth’s nightfall catalyzes a personal darkness that he has no choice but to accept. Regardless, the video is extremely captivating and eerie, transmitted through the signals of the television. 

Life and art and art and life are endless spirals. Forget about which came first, the chicken or the egg; the reality is they are inextricably intertwined. A collage made from what was once a 3-D box, a cloth smeared with the life size image of a Ford Focus, the idea of conceiving a child turned into a physical reality, a television which by nature transforms the moving three-dimensional world into a flat, two-dimensional world for convenient viewing, photographs of marker drawings, traces of objects and reliefs in plaster, oil on aluminum, oil on canvas—all are part of an endless cycle: a process that trickles down from source to source to creation to creation, back to the source. Art is not a recreation of life, but a synthesis of all of its aspects—a multidimensional living entity. Art oscillates between the world as we find it, and the world as we create it. Life Transmissions has the power to both inspire reflection and creation, immersing the viewer in the very cycle of the artistic process and life itself.