WAYS OF BEING

From July 20–August 23, 2019 my work along with those by fellow Canadian artists–Carmelo Arnoldin, Robert Davidovitz and collaborators, John Armstrong and Paul Collins–will show at BoxHeart Gallery, Pittsburgh PA, for Allsorts: an exhibit featuring similar yet unconventional approaches to pattern offering new ways to experience and make sense of life.

Andrew Ooi, Dermis, 2015 | 16 x 14.5 x 1.2 inches, 41 x 37 x 3 cm | Acrylic and ink on 342 Folded Gampi paper paintings

Artworks selected for the exhibition were based on two main criteria: artists using shape, design and repetition to create patterns reconstructing physical and metaphysical order, and the unique ways in which they are achieved, combining mediums with traditional arts and types.

What are those mediums, arts and types? Excerpted from the Exhibit’s press release: Arnoldin’s woven tapestries ascribes shape and pattern to highlight the complicated histories of North American Indigenous and African cultures, which as his materials, without resolution will continue to recycle. Davidovitz conversely, utilizes pattern to reveal metaphysical geographies, consisting of overlapping shapes and perspectives where order and chaos, meet. Ooi’s paper reliefs are the patterned structures that reify the illusive reality as an expression of its type, similar to DNA, making shape active, dynamic, and ever-evolving. Armstrong and Collins animate pattern across photographs of everyday spaces isolating shapes, pattern, and its variant, texture, with uniform strokes of thick oil paint, producing an additional pattern, moiré, that amplifies, crosses-out, and recreates the underlying photograph’s illusionism.

Join me, artist Robert Davidovitz, and the curator, Natalie Shahinian for the exhibit’s public (and free!) reception, July 20 from 5–8pm, in discovering just some of the many new mediums, arts and types making realities from another: an art out of life, and for artists especially, an art into life too.