|
Gallery
210 opens the new year with Joe Chesla: Moments of Illumination: Drawn from
the Liminal on January 31, 2015.
Chesla's
installations aim at engaging the viewer's conscious and the unconscious at
the same time. This is a state Chesla refers to as "non-focus", a
conceptual space between past and future, where one is completely present.
Being present is being accessible to one-self. Our participation in the
hyper-connected contemporary culture's countless media sources mean we seem
to be in a perpetual state of distraction. Chesla states," We are
accessible to the whole world, facebooking, texting, blogging, telephoning,
but not accessible to ourselves. We're out there but not back in
here." One goal in his work is to create flow " . . . a place to
calm down for a second and to have real time with yourself, that is
thoughtful and meaningful."
The
tenets of 1960s and 1970s Minimalism and Process Art largely inform
Chesla's process as far as material orientation, practice and aesthetics
are concerned. His installations are site-specific. He employs standardized
units, and repetition in the design of his pieces and allows the
fundamental character of his materials to remain. He refers to Richard Long
and Agnes Martin as examples of artists who live their art and just do what
they have to do. Their work, Chesla states, "is very clear, true and honest,
and a big influence for me."
Chesla's
aesthetic may be minimalist but his work is not the hermetic,
self-referring, literalist works that were the signature style of the 1960s
and 1970s. His installations are characterized by ambiguity, openness, and
indeterminacy, generous and poetic. Chesla states "There is always a
simplicity within my work that allows an entrance in to it. I believe, in
simplifying something down so far that it just leaves you with yourself.
Of
his work Chesla writes: "Using aspects of order, repetition, stillness
and evolution, I create objects or spaces of unfocused awareness. Working
with the organic-ness of materials and spaces, with the understanding of
human perspective. Within these pieces, we experience manifestations of
internal and external, cool and comforted, filtered and clarity of vision.
We can see the world differently from within the installation as well as
after our departure from it. We can find comfort in glacial speeds and
spaces of great stillness. This work takes the viewer to that place of
personal confrontation with beauty, stillness, isolation, and vast
mindfulness.".
|
|
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home