Radical Departures, Abruptions, and Continuations: a weighted title, bearing multiple considerations.

 

Many stories are contained within the works of these five artists. We looked at their works through a lens of continuity, abruption, and new formations and as a part of an ongoing investigation of radical imagination, posing the following questions: When does a story begin? Where do ruptures, twists and departures light upon new forms and sites of making? What is the agency and narrative of each artist’s work and how does it operate within their history and lineage of their own work? What is the cultural and socio-political context of each?

 

Each of the works represents a staying in the making of highly skilled hands —a continuation of imagination and creation by artists who are often working against great odds to do their work. Some of the abruptions are dramatic and apparent – the story of the activist Leonard Peltier as told by Rigo 23, where the original sculpture was disrupted and the sculptural feet become a site for metaphorical action, “larger than life shoes & quote; upon which to stand. Other narratives move quietly in the pauses of stitches and free form movement of the embroidery of Kim Bennett, repeating the collective action while claiming the raw material of variation. Cathy Lu’s acts of appropriations from traditional Chinese imagery, fruits made strange, are glowing jewels with aberrant call, both continuation and a disruption. Natalia Anciso’s work has a constant finely drawn line, on cloth, paper and wood, stories she knows with a painful intimacy about divides of borders and loss. Keith Secola’s work makes an active reclaiming of colonial gaze, an appropriation reclaimed, with tender markings and fragmentation.

 

As we take our initial questions very seriously, the stories of the work are given in some detail within the exhibition. These stories are of course one set of stories – the work, the viewer, in resonance, imagination and activation, are always another.