Mitch Patrick – Solar Witness (2024)
Mobile 3d printed image, PETG, custom typeface/glyphs, wire, gel medium, photograph printed on aluminum and graphite drawing on paper, 42 x 36.25 inches
The Sequential Injection of Paradigm and Perspectival Shifts
Review by Chunbum Park, February 10, 2025
h(u)m//Echoes
RAINRAIN Gallery, New York
January 24 — February 22, 2025
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Jason Carey-Sheppard, Siheng Liang, Mitch Patrick, Maya Perry, and Zack Rafuls
A recently discovered theory of atoms accurately describes their contradicting behaviors
in low-energy and high-energy states. This new equation, initialed “PDF,” accounts for
the changes in the behavior of atoms, dependent on the ratio of quarks and gluons, the
particles comprising the protons and neutrons in the nuclei. Like scientific
advancements, art provides fresh insights, which flip our relationship to the self
and the world upside down. With each revelation, dark becomes the light, and the light
becomes dark.
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At RAINRAIN, five artists showcase art that reveals the transformative bits and puzzles
of their experience and philosophy: Jason Carey-Sheppard, Siheng Liang, Mitch
Patrick, Maya Perry, and Zack Rafuls. Reading the group show, titled, h(u)m//Echoes, is
akin to processing a radially expansive color space in a linear format, like a computer.
As if trying to solve a mystery, one looks, one artwork at a time, and absorbs bits of
information in succession despite lacking a sequential order or importance.
Jason Carey-Sheppard – Glistening She Emerges (2024)
Oil, acrylic, laminating resin, ink, and collage on canvas with satin MSA Varnish in artist frame
20.25 x 16.75 x 2.25 in
The works’ main categorical or unifying characteristic is that they are paintings with particular care and attention to their framing, lending them a semi-sculptural quality. For example, Jason Carey-Sheppard constructed the frames as a part of the final production and presentation of his works; Zack Rufuls similarly made works in which the diagonally slanting frames are an intrinsic part of the work; even Maya Perry painted the sides of her highly flat panels with very thick sides, which would constitute five different abstract paintings in one (on the front and four sides).
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There is a long tradition of artists who design the frames for their paintings. Gentile da Fabriano of the Italian Renaissance separately designed a frame for his painting titled, “The Adoration of the Magi” (1423). The Expressionists, including Edvard Munch of Norway and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner of Germany, also custom-designed and toned their frames with strokes of color to complement the painting they encased. Lastly, Gustav Klimt of the Austrian Seccession also housed his paintings in frames designed explicitly by Georg Klimt, such as the gilded frame with lettering for “Judith and Holofernes” (1901).
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But this case or observation regarding the artists’ attention or care towards framing is only the beginning of the excavation of their meaning. The artists’ overall intention appears to be to conceptualize their work as pure art that defies any conventional categories, neither as painting nor sculpture nor installation but as an object of aesthetics, or art objects. Artworks are the signifiers pointing towards an abstract, otherworldly world of imagination and metaphors to which the artists serve as the doormen. The artists are the mothers who give birth to angels and demons who originate from this domain, contrasting our world with its material and physical limitations. They acknowledge that a 2D painting is in fact 3-dimensional, even if we try to make the generalized assumption that they are flat and 2D. They understand that every good work of art is abstract, even realistic paintings or photographs.
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What is pure art? What is an aesthetic object? Every good art could be a carrying vehicle or a container of valuable information in the form of a story, thought, meaning, or vision. This is because the most fundamental unit of the cosmos is information, which may in fact be a simulation within a simulation. Mitch Patrick’s “Solar Witness” (2024) is a complex piece that closely relates to this perspective. The artist re-designs the keyboard alphabet, including the “space” and arranges them as pixels on a large, transparent, rectangular image made from 3D printing on grid panels. The work represents and re-translates solar eclipse photographs as a 3-dimensional photographic collage. The continuity and the illusion of the photograph as an image is broken as pixels that comprise a matrix, in which the image of the eclipse scatters and repeats throughout the composition. This work ultimately becomes a computational system of information, like a multiplication table or a calculator.
Zack Rafuls – Bedroom Star (2016 – 2023)
Inkjet prints, pvc panels, acrylic, graphite, foamcore, and aluminum, 37 x 21 x 2 inches
Zack Rafuls’ painting, titled “Bedroom Star” (2016 – 2023), takes inspiration from the perspective system born from the Renaissance, using diagonals for its frame embedded in the overall piece. Knowing the perspective system is key to understanding how to visualize the physical and spatial aspects of the 3-dimensional world. However, the perspective in this painting is one of multiple perspectives, in which the painting acknowledges the intrusion of the diagonal lines of another observer’s viewpoint. This also comes with the realization that each set of perspective lines and vanishing point only applies to a single observer.
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Situated opposite the works dealing with the computational and/or mathematical aspects is Siheng Liang’s encaustic painting titled “We Are Finally Together Again” (2023). The painting has a curved edge that serves as a spatial distortion, a continuity to the gallery wall, and a frame. Endowed with a lyrical feel and impressionistic color palette, this painting also contains codes and signs that work together to form a psychological space of the subconscious imagination. Psychologically, young faces peer out as extensions from a tree-like base or trunk. The work relates not only to childhood, which we can recollect to varying degrees, but is also a pointer to a world and a much more innocent and purer state, just like the world of aesthetics. As we grow up, we master this world’s logical and material aspects and abandon our innocent and metaphorical, poetic, and illogical ways of being. The artist was perhaps trying to return to this kind of pure state of innocence that existed before Peter Pan’s children grew up.
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Maya Perry’s risograph and ink-based work “Seeking Light, Seeking Pest” (2024) also carries a nostalgic energy relating to our earliest experience with light, especially warmth. We consider pests or insects the fairies of our natural world, whom we then anthropomorphize in our imagination and simultaneously vilify within reality. The image that Perry discovered is the point of contact with the truth about us. The aesthetic realm is not a universe but a multi-verse in which different aesthetic values appear incompatible. Humans reject insect-like appearances, while the insects are unaware they could appear violent and grotesque under a microscope. In Perry’s earnest investigation, however, only the quality of innocence we had as children would permit us to strive toward the light and towards the little bugs humming away, now found in the echoes of our memories.
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Finally, Jason Carey-Sheppard’s “Glistening She Emerges” (2024) is an unconventional painting partially built up with resin and has the texture and translucency of a pink quartz or milky white crystal. Again, this work takes on a sculptural quality due to the big and wide frame that houses the canvas at its center, in the fashion of a temple. The composition is abstract, and the work tries to say something without saying anything directly, which would involve object-based imagery, symbols, or icons. This work may appear ambiguous in its articulation of meaning. Still, the artist carefully avoids reducing the work’s experience or feeling to a word or concept, inviting a cliché interpretation. The work is never trying to achieve a representation or a rendering of external memory or meaning to the viewer; it is instead trying to awaken the universal sensation and collective memory within each of us. It is written that Carey-Sheppard deals with the themes of harvest, nature, and domesticity. However, the colors in the work that appear to belong to the flesh or the soft vulnerability of love may be a subconscious or automatic choice by the artist describing her in the title – possibly a lover.
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With only the concept of “hums and echoes” to guide us, we encounter several revelations throughout the exhibition curated by Rain Lu, culminating in the idea that our core aesthetic needs are abstract because our fundamental origin before our human existence is also abstract. We begin with the computational and simulated aspects of our material reality; then we are reminded of our metaphorical and illogical origin before birth, to which our self from childhood is the closest; we also learn that the aesthetic realm that we refer to in our art and imagination as humans is just one of many worlds; and, lastly, our most essential memories and feelings may be best captured by the ambiguous and subtle language of abstraction because our true origin is pre-human and lies prior to the world of material objects.
Siheng Liang – We are Finally Together Again (2023)
Encaustic on panel, 15.6 x 19.5 inches
Maya Perry – Seeking light, Seeking Pest (2024)
Risograph/Soybean Ink on Panel, 10 x 8 inches