AFTERMATH: Post-Minimal Abstraction
Brian Caraway, Lisa Espenmiller, Connie Goldman, Connie Harris, David Allan Peters, Dianne Romaine
OCTOBER 4 - NOVEMBER 22, 2013
Brian Caraway Chance Grows Big, 2013 acrylic on panel 78 x 76 inches
Chandra Cerrito Contemporary presents Aftermath: Post-Minimal Abstraction, featuring six painters working within the framework of minimal imagery, repetitive mark-making, pattern, and often an emphasis on process and materiality. Whether micro or macrocosm, these are works that invoke an internal, contemplative response comparable to slow walking through landscape--- requiring, alternately, a closer view, a steep climb, a quiet pause.
Lisa Espenmiller's paintings are visual haiku offered as objects of reflection, linked to her writing practice as well as the practice of meditation. Repetitive, horizontal, scribbled threads of color echo the process of handwritten text and appear to float upon color field "pages".
In contrast to Lisa's work, Brian Caraway delivers switched on, caffeine-tinged color field optical effects sometimes directly referencing Op Art. Jarring, repetitively patterned paintings seem to vibrate and feature a design-related palette that commands attention.
Dianne Romaine's use of saturated pigment in her Chroma series composes a dramatic, almost photographically rendered void flooded with light. This captured moment references the photographic, giving the viewer a frozen glimpse of a transient glow.
Connie Goldman fabricates multi-sectioned panels that are constructed into something resembling origami or folded cloth, but in fact reference landscape, architecture and musical scores. The spatial quality rendered continues off the surface into a point in the far distance: elegantly formed spaces that seem empty, quiet places of solitude.
Connie Harris applies short marks of pigment that march horizontally in a kind of disorderly order across a contrasting color field. The resulting color combinations play off of one another, producing the moire effect of woven cloth.
The layered paintings of David Allan Peters are excavations of an organic process, tracing the tree-ring like marking of time. Layer upon layer of color on panel is gouged and removed, revealing small, scar-like openings.
-Essay written by Claudia Tennyson
Curated by Chandra Cerrito
