ARC Magazine: Morton Fine Art presents ‘Timeless Remnants’ featuring Maya Freelon Asante, GA Gardner and Choichun Leung

 

 

Morton Fine Art presents ‘Timeless Remnants’ featuring Maya Freelon Asante, GA Gardner and Choichun Leung

By ARC Magazine Sunday, September 21st, 2014

The abstract artwork in Timeless Remnants combines elements of “inherited” collective memory consisting of pre-existent forms and each artist’s individual experience of life, colored with her/his unique culture, personality and life events. The featured artists (including Maya Freelon Asante, GA Gardner, and Choichun Leung), hail from varied countries of origin, and bring forward bountiful travels and experiences from around the world. The exhibition opens September 26th and will be available to view through to October 17th, 2014. Read more on the exhibition and artists below:

Jung stated that “in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature…there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually, but is inherited”. Timeless Remnants explores that which resonates within the collective and individual memory and aims to elicit universal emotional response through techniques of script, mark making, composition, palette, texture, layering, energy and tensions present in the artwork.

About Maya Freelon Asante (Chapel Hill, b. USA): Maya Freelon Asante is an award-winning artist whose artwork was described by poet Maya Angelou as “visualizing the truth about the vulnerability and power of the human being,” and her unique tissue paper work was also praised by the International Review of African American Art as a “vibrant, beating assemblage of color.” She was selected by Modern Luxury Magazine as Best of the City 2013 and by the Huffington Post’s “Black Artists: 30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 You Should Know“. Maya has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including Paris, Ghana, and US Embassies in Madagascar, Italy, Jamaica, and Swaziland. She has been a professor of art at Towson University and Morgan State University. Maya has attended numerous residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Kokrobitey Institute and Brandywine Workshop. She earned a BA from Lafayette College and an MFA from the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

About GA Gardner (Trinidad, b. Trinidad): Gardner’s work is a visual representation of the proliferation of media and information in contemporary society and the resulting cacophony of messages it engenders. The goal of his work is to dissect and neutralize the white noise found in these forms of media and create cohesive stories that integrate his cultural background as an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago living and working in the USA. He presents a Caribbean aesthetic in his art by utilizing colors, textures, and environments as the lens through which he sees urban contemporary life in America, weaving his cultural identity back into the fabric of our society. GA Gardner began his professional art career in New York City, creating and exhibiting large format 3D computer fine art in 1996. Gardner studied fine art at San Francisco State University, California, from which he earned both his Bachelor’s of Arts and Master’s of Arts degrees. Gardner crafted mixed media art and animation at The Ohio State University, Columbus, where he earned a Ph.D. in Art Education in 1995. Gardner has served as a professor of art and animation at various universities, including William Paterson University (Wayne, New Jersey); University of the District of Columbia; and George Mason University (Fairfax, Virginia), and has been a lecturer at The Ohio State University.

About Choichun Leung (New York, b. UK): Leung’s “Diplopia” series of paintings occurred after losing partial eyesight in 2013 and living with double vision for a period of half a year. During this time, her perspective as a visual artist changed drastically – she no longer saw detail in objects clearly, had no spacial depth of vision, saw contrast and light intensely and sounds became more acute. Moving objects were blurry as her eyes could not synchronize to follow movement. The work in this series is an expression of what she experienced visually; when everything overlapped, and was blurry, intertwined and complex. Her “Diplopia” paintings are a record of the new way of seeing, which made her question her perception of reality of the senses, where loss created a new meaning of abstract impressions and color. She was raised in Wales, born to a British mother and Chinese father. Leung earned a degree in 3D design specializing in metalsmithing in the U.K., and later operated a metal studio fabricating her vessel designs and percussion instruments. Leung participated in the Ray Man Chinese Orchestra in London, performing Chinese classical and folk music. She later studied Buddhist Symbolism at the Yungang Caves Archaeological Site in China. This is her fourth exhibition at Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC.

Exhibition: September 26th- October 17th, 2014

Opening Night Reception: Friday, September 26th, 6pm-8pm Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave NW, Washington, DC 20009, United States

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ARC Magazine

ARC Inc. is a non-profit print and online publication and social platform launched in 2011. It seeks to fill a certain void by offering a critical space for contemporary artists to present their work while fostering and developing critical dialogues and opportunities for crucial points of exchange. ARC is an online and social space of interaction with a developed methodology of sharing information about contemporary practices, exhibitions, partnerships, and opportunities occurring in the Caribbean region and throughout its diasporas.

– See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/09/morton-fine-art-presents-timeless-remnants-featuring-the-work-of-maya-freelon-asante-ga-gardner-and-choichun-leung/#sthash.TvTrmkOZ.dpuf

ARC Magazine interviews GA GARDNER on his show “Timeless Remnants”

 

Audible fragments amid the noise: An interview with GA Gardner

By Marsha Pearce Thursday, September 25th, 2014 Categories: Exhibitions, Features, Updates

Caribbean-born artist GA Gardner will display his work along with Maya Freelon Asante (USA) and Choichun Leung (UK) in the group show entitled Timeless Remnants. The exhibition opens on September 26, 2014 at Morton Fine Art (MFA) in Washington DC. Gardner migrated from his birthplace of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago to North America in 1988, where he earned a BA in Visual Arts and an MA from San Francisco State University. He was also awarded a doctoral degree in Art Education from Ohio State University.

Gardner’s contemporary art practice homes in on the colossal machine of mass media and the messages it churns out. He extracts bits of information, dislodging them from specific moments in time to create new narratives; new points of identification and fresh collages of meaning that have personal and collective resonance. In the lead up to the show at MFA, Gardner shares insights into his art, revealing the influence of his life in and travels between the Caribbean and the U.S., his navigation of the terrain of randomness, and his engagement with the territory of patterns. The artist also speaks about the significance of timelessness in his work and his commitment to making Caribbean and African identities audible amid a din of Western communications.

Marsha Pearce: The exhibition Timeless Remnants seems to draw on discourses of psychology, including the work of such thinkers as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud posited the idea of “archaic remnants” or an “archaic heritage which a child brings with him [or her] into the world” (1940, p167). Jung also proposed his ideas. In addition to what he saw as a personal unconscious, which serves as a repository of experiences that are unique to each person, Jung asserted the notion of a second psychic system. He called this second system the collective unconscious and described it as that which is inherited. Does your work engage with a universal inheritance that you are deliberately making conscious with your art? If so, what do you see as that inheritance and how do you attend to it in your creative practice?

GA Gardner: I believe that I, like all human beings, am influenced by what has come before me. That might mean the personal structure of my familial ties, as well as the influences of artists before me. I don’t believe that any human being or artist for that matter, can create in a vacuum. I see my inheritance, if you want to call it that, as one that is traced back to my African roots at the primal level and to my Caribbean heritage, most recently. That is overlaid with my experience in the United States, where I have spent most of my adult years. So, I call on all of these influences, this inheritance – this collective unconscious – in my work. I use the rhythms and colours of Africa and the Caribbean to filter the “sounds” and “expressions” of America’s global communication machine.

MP: You seem to be foregrounding a specific collective unconscious; or pinpointing specific groups – African and Caribbean people. I am thinking though, about your attention to a global proliferation of media and messages in your art. Are we perhaps more and more the inheritors of a cacophony of media messages? Do you see that as an inheritance that is largely unconscious and one that goes beyond African and Caribbean “boundaries”?

GAG: Yes, that particularly applies in the 21st century, with the global reach and access of media messages.

MP: I want to return to Jung as a reference point. According to Jung, the collective unconscious is said to be expressed through archetypes or patterns. Can you talk about the role of patterns in your work?

GAG: Patterns are a fundamental component of my work. They often emerge from randomness as information is literally sliced out of context to form a montage of images that carries random conversations. These overall patterns and shapes are replicated from ancient African and modern Caribbean design. Like the Kuba people of central Africa I am interested in the construct of pattern and design. In addition, I find and use contemporary materials and I add a Caribbean colour palette to create art that best symbolizes our current state of being. Though I allow the process to lead, I commit to cultural forms and lines – for example, the geometric foms and lines that are inherent to cultures like that of the Kuba people – as guides for the direction of a piece. This does allow patterns to emerge uninhibited from my work. This is the magic of the creative process – a life, seemingly of its own, that the artistic endeavour engenders.

MP: Your visual amalgams of material remnants seem time consuming. How does the passage of time factor into your work? How might the concept of timelessness enter your visual statements?

GAG: Since my work reinvents and reinterprets material, timelessness is at the center of my creative expression. Once I have disassociated material from its former use and place in time, I allow it to flow free; to be unfettered from the moment it was created, or from any limitations of space or time. The repurposing of these fragments of communication produces an ageless, timeless new identity, which frees my work from temporal boundaries.

MP: You live and work in the Caribbean and the USA. What is it that remains with you as you move between those spaces and how do those remnants of experience in both spaces inform your work?

GAG: My work is conceptual; it represents the struggle for identity that we all face in the midst of globalization – chiefly, the dominance of Western influences and the struggle to be heard amongst all the noise of media. This is apparent in my travels; therefore I am compelled to represent this conflict in my art.  I am not one who watches TV nor am I a news junky; I try my best to tune these elements out of my life. The very nature of going between these two countries reinforces the need for the messages in my art.  It is born of the fact that we in the Caribbean consume so much foreign media that we are often at a loss for our personal and cultural identity.

I bring the printed content of North America’s vast media machine to the Caribbean and recycle it, extracting its artificial hues, and often add a rich colour palette found naturally in my Caribbean surroundings. This is the synergy I want in my art. I am making a statement that despite the dominance of Western media, Africa and the Caribbean will be heard – at least through the colour palette and patterns in my mixed media art.

The exhibition Timeless Remnants runs from September 26 to October 17, 2014 at Morton Fine Art, Washington, DC, USA.

– See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/09/audible-fragments-amid-the-noise-an-interview-with-ga-gardner/#sthash.d5zYGO5i.dpuf

 

Marsha Pearce

Marsha Pearce is ARC’s Senior Arts Writer and Editor. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of the West Indies (UWI) St Augustine Campus, Trinidad. She lectures in the Department of Creative and Festival Arts at UWI and is also a freelance arts writer for the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian newspaper. Pearce is the 2006 Rhodes Trust Rex Nettleford Cultural Studies Fellow.

– See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/09/audible-fragments-amid-the-noise-an-interview-with-ga-gardner/#sthash.d5zYGO5i.dpuf