Bear Kirkpatrick
Tatiana Parcero
RES & Constanza Piaggio
Guillermo Srodek Hart
Jennifer Thoreson
December 6 - February 29, 2019
an online contemporary art exhibition
Winter is a quiet season. Nature slows down; the sun traces low and the air cools. As the brilliance of fall fades and our breath hangs in the air we turn inward with a hush. Our primal nature calls for hibernation. To find solitude is also to discover clarity, and a certain sense of spirituality, knowing that rest and reflection is the very source of renewal. The works in this online gallery exhibition draw out these themes and ask us to pause, and situate ourself in the scope of something more.
Bear Kirkpatrick’s work implicates multiplicities. His is a study on connectivity and eternity. It is natural to forget what being human is: it is imperfection, it is incompletion, it is ephemeral. As individuals we will not exist forever, but what we are of has existed forever. We know the universe is limitless, but knowledge still fails to make all apparent. Kirkpatrick’s photography offers a glimpse of the fiber that makes the thread of the blanket of the eternal. These spiritualistic landscapes are from the Hierophanies series by Bear Kirkpatrick.
Tatiana Parcero’s oeuvre explores the body and its implicated connections to identity and the natural world. Her work is about subtle, meditative reflection. Parcero is known to juxtaposes the human figure, which in nearly all the work is her own, and found imagery. Through the years she has integrated anatomical drawings, codices, colonial and astrological maps, chemical constructions, and naturalist-style drawings into her fine art. Works in this gallery exhibition from Ossis are new, and represent the first time Parcero has re-photographed her body in many years. These works celebrate the harmony and unity of all creatures as well as the continuum of life.
Constanza Piaggio & RES’s Conatus series studies how the Renaissance perspective has been naturalized in Western Art and reminds us our gaze has been built by cultural phenomena. The 'history of the pose’ in the construction of meaning and the pictorial unconscious underlying every image are intimately bound to each other. The contemporary artists applied these theories to infamous images in art history, changing major or minor details to the referent, but maintaining an underlying structure. These small shifts can have major implications on meaning. Suicide, included here, references the suicide of Lucretia, 1525-30 by Lucas Cranach The Elder. In the original painting, a young woman holds a dagger to her chest. The figure in this work holds a replica of the first atom bomb.
Guillermo Srodek Hart wanders the countryside of his homeland, Argentina, to make contemporary photographs of places that seem to exist outside of time: bars, barbers shops, pharmacies, dry cleaners, workbenches and repair stores, butcher shops, bakeries, and country stores are among the subjects of his Stories series. These spaces are often hidden away if not entirely forgotten. Generally free of figures, the occasional inclusion being a ghostly blur from motion and long-exposure, the artist likens these images to portraits. His camera captures more than rustic interiors, but part of a free human spirit that lingers in them. Man’s mark echoes in the wear-pattern of the floorboards and paint-chipped walls.
Jennifer B. Thoreson’s photography is surreal yet spiritual. Works from the included Flora series by Thoreson were inspired by a trip to Alcatraz. Towering concrete, heavy bars, and tight spaces give way to the prisoner’s gardens. The distinction between confinement and growth is what inspired this work. The figures are bound by facets, wire, even their own blooms. Fixed or affixed, these figures speak to the power of renewal, the desire to tend and to heal.