Opening Recption: Colour Interaction. A group exhibition featuring works by Barry Allikas, Melanie Authier, Daniel Hutchinson, David Spriggs, and Robert Youds
Colour Interaction Barry Allikas, Melanie Authier, Daniel Hutchinson, David Spriggs, Robert Youds
20 March 2014 - 26 April 2014
Following Newtons exploration of colour theory as visual vibrations, artists such as Josef Albers have identified colour as an inherently deceptive element, one that produces unpredictable visual synapses through the relation of one color to another. There is strength in the pairing of complimentary colors, such as Red and Green, but when those same colours are combined, there is often a simultaneous neutralization of this strength, which is subdued into black and white.
The work of the artists featured in the exhibition Colour Interaction cultivates and problematizes our perception of color fields. This exhibition is a kinetic experience, where artists employ light and pigment in order to create a revolutionized experience of color.
Barry Allikas rhythmic, carved colour forms are made using a progressive application of brushless paint and hard-edge composition. Distancing himself from Molinari and Gaucher, who painted traditional abstracts, Allikas paintings offer a rich, non-objective narrative of colour, rather than a formalist presentation of color blocking. The substance of Allikas works is drawn from a series of randomized preliminary computer graphics and compositional adjustments. The result produces fragmented images infused with the concept of post-humanism, where the order of human perception is disrupted by the intervention of a technological ordering of color relations.
In contrast to Allikas work, Melanie Authiers abstract paintings create kaleidoscopic environments through interacting fields of textured pigment. Her method is derived from expressionist and hard-edge techniques, which result in the explosion of prisms of color, engaging and reacting to one another as if to mimic human movement. Authiers work engages with the viewer phenomenologically, creating a relationship between the motion and action in light and colour with that of the human body.
Daniel Hutchinsons viscous paintings are enhanced with neon lights and projected from various angles, against black canvases. Through his application of optic reflexivity, Hutchinson creates a tension between the geometric textures of the black paint and the ethereality of the neon light. Using the reflection of colour as a method of perceiving light, Hutchinsons work transcends the canvas, creating in its wake, dynamic sculptural forms.
Robert Youds plays with perception and transparency by constructing life-sized, three-dimensional paintings composed by the layering of color fields, referred to as light paintings. Works like Ericksons Smith house, stimulate his audience into a meditative state of lucid dreaming, where colours are able to intimately interact with the viewer.
David Spriggs in his installation, 4 Colour Separation, isolates in four vitrines the colours that are used in the four-colour printing process: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black CMYK. Spriggs cross formation of four stratachromes utilize multiple transparent surfaces, each uniquely spray-painted and layered through space. By bringing colour into an arrangement in physical space, Spriggs questions the purity of a single colour and if it is possible to actually separate colour; as each colour interacts and reflects into each other. 4 Colour Separation invites the viewer to experience the perceptual and phenomenological interaction of four iconic colours of our mediated era.
