Continuing through July 2, 2011
Ginny Bishton, Ingrid Calame and Scott Short are artists obsessed with process who have developed a labor intensive system that defines their works. The resulting works are abstract in nature, but are a product of manipulation and distortion, often through repetition of the man-made. The overlapping circles in Bishton's photographic collages are in fact photographs of bowls of soup made from plants in her garden. The circles of bright colors - organized in geometric patterns - are obsessively cut from their frames and layered to create a patterned surface. The origin of the circles of colors is not clear, and the works take on new meaning when the source of the color is revealed. This unmasking of source is central to all three artists.
Calame creates her surfaces by tracing splotches found on the ground at various locations, and then filling in the shapes with created forms that reference the original location. In this case the location is the Arcelor Mittal Steel Shipping Building in Buffalo, New York. Calame was attracted to the hand stenciled numbers on the factory floors, and this element figures prominently in the finished works.
Short's latest offerings intrigue and dazzle. His continued execution of a Walter Benjamin-adjacent practice entails producing dozens, if not hundreds of machine copies of colored paper, until he achieves just the right level of mechanical sublimity. He then faithfully depicts that image. The smaller versions here beg the question as to whether they were made for marketability, as the seven-footers that lined the walls of his last solo a year ago seem to be the ideal scale. The show-stopper here, "Untitled (Double Green)," successfully continues the bubbles-in-space iteration of his iconography, and if you do a little research, you'll see that the right panel of "Double Green" appears to be the exact replica of a slightly larger work included in his earlier solo show. Is it too much commitment to an image? Either way, it remains a winning formula. The juxtaposition of these three artist's works makes the connection between process and intent seem like a trend.
Christopher Grimes Gallery
Published courtesy of ArtSceneCal ©2011
