Texts
One Year, One Year Later
Herron Galleries, Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN
Exhibition Text
These paintings, seven through eighteen from an ongoing series, give visual form to the artist's memory of observing and recording the color of a hydrangea flower as it bloomed, decayed and disintegrated from the summer of 2000 through the spring of 2001. Regarding the artist's paintings, Bill Brown has written: "Such a study of change-over-time might well be imagined as a site where the genres of landscape and history painting dissolve into one another, distilled into a sequence of small and slight sensations. More readily, this series evokes classic moments in the history of modernist painting (Seurat's pointillism, say, and Agnes Martin's minimalism) even as it brings to mind a host of other media (from mosaic to needlepoint, from print to the digital screen) all the while insisting–against those latter evocations–on the integrity of the painted mark and the mastery of stretched canvas. The marks themselves–each a scene of exquisite replication and individuation–register the fate of the moment, of the momentary, within each work's own production." As the scale of each painting determines the number of marks (25,088 marks per each canvas), the architecture determines the number of canvasses presented. The finite qualities of each canvas and of the limits of this space invite the viewer to imagine the infinite nature of time. Each painting and this installation, then, as Bill Brown has said, "stages the simultaneity of distinct temporalities": represented time (the record of perennial growth and decay), remembered time (from summer 2000 through spring 2001), enacted time (the history of the work's manufacture), phenomenological time (the spectator's experience), infinite time (revealed through the finite yet serial paintings and the determinate space), and the time that is not this time (the time that came before and the time that will come after).
