Friday, January 11, 2013 to Friday, February 15, 2013
7:00- 10:00 PM
Forest City Gallery proudly announces our next exhibition:
Bracket(ed), a collaborative exhibition featuring works by Dickson Bou and Thomas Chisholm.
Duration: January 11th to February 15th, 2013.
Opening Reception: Friday, January 11th, 2013 from 7-10 PM.
Artist Talk: Saturday, January 12th from 1:00 PM- 2:00 PM
Brain Trust (Kirkpatrick and Thompson) will be playing at Hot Dog Musique and Cinema at 7:00 PM.
Forest City presents a collaborative exhibition by artists Dickson Bou and Thomas Chisholm, Bracket(ed) on January 11 through February 15th, 2013. This show will concentrate on the spatial and temporal interplay between their work and explore the complexity of viewership within the realm of space-time objectivity.
Dickson Bou and Thomas Chisholm: Bracket(ed)
The word “bracket” can be understood in a variety of ways, generally alluding to ideas of structure, ornamentation, pairing, or acts of joining. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word as something which signs enclosure so as to separate from a context. It is also the act of grouping something together within a system so that the elements are of equal standing. The word also refers to ornamental shelf-like projections, and joining by means of a brace. To establish a bracket is also a military procedure of approximating the object of target, by firing one shot before the target and one shot beyond, informing where the target might be in between. Etymologically, the word is presumed to branch from Latin “braca”, meaning “pants”, which might suggest a kind of mechanical branching off of limbs into two directions, (un)folding, while maintaining singularity to one body. Allegedly this connection relates to the visual resemblance of architectural brackets to the appearance of codpiece armour. These details might seem arbitrary in the context of this exhibition, there are no gun battles or breeches here, but such associative leaps speak to the basic linguistic desire to correlate in the world of appearances through physical likeness – mimesis as division toward singularity.
To some extent, Bracket(ed) is about the etymology of surfaces, as signs, in the definition of imagined-versus-real space. We approach this exhibition with preconceived familiarity of everyday simulated environment, to discover the imitation of this language in turn imitating itself, folding in on itself. The attitudes of visual frames and enclosures (bracketing) reverberate from reflective synthesis to reinvented space. This is active space, requiring of the viewer to retrace and navigate processes of recognition and comparison.
Much like decorative brackets of the architectural variety, which reference only the image of structural support, these works in actuality contain little structural function. The amount of construction invested in the presentation of these objects does not exceed anything further than what is needed for the support of illusion. Surface becomes the structure. Thomas Chisolm’s aluminum stripes recall the shape and stature of architectural brackets, but there is no horizontal plane on top that is being supported.
This suggests that what is held up is space itself, in its immaterial continuum. It supports first the imagined (immaterial) space in the surface of the painting, then projects outside of itself to dismantle and cut through this imagined reality, directing attention to objecthood, environment, and the temporal currents of associative thought in between.
The objects reveal action through stasis, action is implied, in past tense, and the images require duration for the mind to perceive and refabricate. Dickson Bou’s Wood on White sculptures recall suggestions of structural narrative (e.g. shipwrecks, airplanes, cake), but the weight is as achromatic and duplicitous as the wood veneer, as the papery cutouts. As soon as a specific narrative or action is targeted by the viewer, it already begins to fold back into its material actuality, which was the shell that called on the narrative association in the first place.
What is occurring in this exhibition can be likened to the Deleuzian fold, which basically suggests that the inside is nothing more than a fold of the outside, that the self affects the self. Reflections create folds, becoming an act of pairing – bracketing – joining of gaps. With this exhibition, it is possible to visualize how etymology, as a vehicle of temporal lineage, moves forth through systems of reflection – attitudes of imitation of the outside, bracketed against internal self-mimesis.
-Sasha Opeiko