The latest artwork by Brigan Gresh and Dina Mack befits in unison the space it currently inhabits at the Lake Eustis Museum of Art in Central Florida until May 22, 2011. Three and two dimensional pieces, video installation, photos, and deconstructed poetry, glint the magic of railing viewers into a feat in confluence and harmony that sidesteps concretion in any other realm of discourse.
The collaboration tailored to the given venue slots in with such an intrinsically dainty and soft-spoken, fluid ease, that any attempt to split the main entities here would seem wasted. Fused algorithms point to vast fields of meanings where sparse color and textural syncopations, all contained within the predominance of white, show how the subtlest elements can pierce deep within shared experience and commonality.
Revelations at the Opening Night
As the artists spoke at the opening night about their own works—and at times on the works of each other—they gave away the degree of zest and practice deployed into this exhibit. Gresh and Mack had worked together before, and the results have always been haunting. Their mutual fellow feeling holds firm. After an overview about their team plan for this occasion, each discussed and responded to questions on selected pieces.
Amid its postmodern signature, In the White blurts tangibles that have converged to create a choral account ranging from crucial childhood moments (see Gresh’s Dress) to the prospects of renewed growth and flowering in the time yet to come (see Mack’s Pasti, “Easter” in Romanian). Both artists in this joint exhibit search and discover zones where many devices of inquiry have failed to feel.
Poetics from Lesser Matter
Gresh’s intense but far-from-schmaltzy treatment of sensation meets with Mack’s intimate keenness to hit upon epiphanies in transient and often overlooked phenomena. The sync reverberates in its pursuit for what takes precedence over matter, though the artists in question seldom give short shrift to its existence, however ordinary. In their hands, objects that may have otherwise lacked self-contained importance ascend to…
…the Blanched Vastness of the Metaphor
Everyday items—a book, hinges, yarn, pins, candles, scraps of paper with handwritten notes, clear glass—abandon their original tellurian property to romp in the blanched vastness of the metaphor. In the White pivots on the notion that the achromatic color of maximum lightness, as with the lost mythical island of Thule, sublimates reality to higher possibilities of expression.
Blankness looms in the creative temperament as an incubus whom art must exorcize. In a most efficient move, Gresh and Mack have tampered with the museum’s natural and electric lightening sources, and thus the consequential space of its pieces further underscores their aesthetic valor.
In the White, to be sure, veers daughters qua artists that have faced hand in hand a motherless void, a second chance at life, at love, but above all, at conceiving and birthing the resistance that best defines their gripping skill: the resistance against the darkness of oblivion, or the utter anaesthesia of the unfelt.
Egberto Almenas - Egberto Almenas is a literary and art scholar, author of four books of essays and a frequent contributor in both Spanish and English ...
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