Ahbyah Baker, Angela Grossmann, Maya Gulin, Sonja Ratkay, and M.E. Sparks: A Beast Salient

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Maya Gulin, "Your Face When I FinallyRecognize Your Face," 2015

A Beast Salient

Ahbyah Baker, Angela Grossmann, Maya Gulin,

Sonja Ratkay, and M.E. Sparks  

Opening: November 24th, 6-9 pm 

Franc Gallery presents a group show curated by Brynn McNab, with work by Ahbyah Baker, Angela Grossmann, Maya Gulin, Sonja Ratkay, and M.E. Sparks. These artists create form and figure through a method of iterative abstraction, modifying the purity of form that so refined modernism by treating the abstract with a productive rather than reductive approach. Responding to contemporary conditions of feedback and distortion, these forms of abstraction are found through systems predetermined by the borders of the medium. An emphasis on the figure or the body as opposed to a ground produces inchoate entities whose mechanics display the complexity of sentience. Embryonic, the forms created are not found through a process of distillation; they find their method of operation in between previous systems of order, and the insertion of the self here abrades the austerity of the medium around it.

These iterations suggest the curved parade of gestures when you stand between two mirrors; they write a new alphabet that acts out its mythology. Like the word repeated until it loses its meaning, they gain a new and vibrant power. They evidence what can simmer up from the medium when it is under pressure. Their beasts are what stir in the contiguous space between text and being, sculpture and painting, language and creature, figure and ground.

The artists begin with the voided space of the picture plane, but work from it with a swerve principle in mind, allowing a chanciness that has the potential to amass gravity. They are creating the conditions from which the new can emerge, and have the humility to take into account that in all probability, this experiment may take some repeating. Buried in this practice is a sardonic criticism: Baker, Grossmann, Gulin, Ratkay and Sparks have taken the exhaustive eradication that the dominant figures of the last century have expended so much effort to perfect, and each in their own way brew within it new life.

Image: Your Face When I FinallyRecognize Your Face, Maya Gulin, 2015.