YVONNE OSEI Who Discovers the Discoverer?
JUSTIN HENRY MILLER Hustle and Glo
JON HOWARD YOUNG Third Post
E.R.O. Concrete Tapestry
August 31 – September 29, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, August 31, 2018, from 5 to 8 pm
Artists Talk: Saturday, September 15, 2018 at 4 pm
Yvonne Osei presents an exhibition of new works titled Who Discovers the Discoverer? Yvonne Osei’s creative practice examines beauty and colorism, the politics of clothing, complexities associated with global trade, and the residual implications of colonialism in post-colonial West Africa and Western cultures. This new body of work explores the influence of colonialism and Western education on the West African psyche. Using Ghana's public-school uniforms as a symbol of knowledge-seeking, Yvonne Osei travels to European countries, including Portugal, France, and Spain, on a quest to question, analyze, and confront historical narratives. The series of photographs and video work, Who Discovers the Discoverer? ushers in another journey and lens to dissecting colonial histories. In the New Media Room, Yvonne Osei will be presenting a new video-work titled Estou à procura de Diogo de Azambuja (which translates "I am looking for Diogo de Azambuja").
Justin Henry Miller presents an exhibition of new works on paper titled Hustle and Glo. Justin Henry Miller’s work emerges from an interest in our inundation of images and the mental layering that occurs as we experience, process, and recall. As we age we experience more, and our cognitive webs grow denser. The elements that compose Miller’s paintings are coalescing fragments that teeter between cooperation and individualism. In some instances, the interweaving layers come together to provide a greater clarity, while in others they convolute. Still in some pieces, unique moments ultimately prevail. In the series of works that comprise the Hustle and Glo exhibition, Miller follows a series of protocols when composing these images. The paintings are created reductively, using the white of the paper to serve as the initial or ‘key’ layer. A layer of color is then applied, and another layer of linear imagery is masked out. This process is repeated through multiple color layers until finally the masked areas are removed back down to the white of the original surface. The result is an ancestral armature emerging from the relational forms grafted on top.
Jon Howard Young presents an exhibition of new sculptures titled Third Post. The exhibition includes works about the development of language, visual symbols, and signage. Young appropriates symbols from various points in history; looking back to Paleolithic cave paintings and Greek pottery to contemplate visual language as well as pulling symbols from recent culture such as the line in the sand found in Western films and cartoons. Using the American West as a backdrop, Young grounds the position of these works in histories and mythologies of new frontiers. The work comes from Young’s personal experience of continuous travel that came with being a child of a military family and reflects on the cultural displacement of his Native American identity. Young uses textiles, sand collected from significant places of his nomadic life, and the languages of the Arte Povera movement to create works that act as signs to become points of orientation in an ever-shifting sense of place and time. The current work is an extension of a series of works that Young began in 2016 entitled Waymark Margins. The iridescent fabric performs similarly to hallucinations in a desert; visible yet elusive, like a hologram. They flicker, shift, and move as the viewer changes their orientation to the works. The embossed pillowy surface of these works not only reaches out to the viewer, but also have reflective properties that create a disorienting sense of space within them. Young repeats these disorienting signs to give a viewer recurring moments, so they consider their orientation among them.
The collaborative group E.R.O. (Experimental Research Office) presents a temporary installation titled Concrete Tapestry. Concrete Tapestry subverts the perceptual and literal heaviness of concrete construction through a series of delicate linear networks fabricated by experimental methods. The project investigates the potential of textile craft to generate new configurations of reinforced concrete, translating an existing small-scale technique into larger-scale architecture. Each “tapestry” is reinforced with a braided carbon fiber armature that leverages techniques from traditional lacemaking—those that usually produce pictorial motifs—into purposeful forms that adopt a material and structural function. The project builds on previous research employing a hybridized computational and analogue workflow for the design and fabrication of each underlying armature.
Public Hours: Monday through Friday 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
Bruno David Gallery
7513 FORSYTH BOULEVARD
SAINT LOUIS MO 63105
314.696.2377
