PraiseSongs for the Numinous at Cavin-Morris Gallery
The exhibition of new
sculpture at Cavin-Morris Gallery shows a sense of curatorial care which
imbues the space with the feeling of a dining room methodically
organized for a dinner party, where the attention is paid not only to
the detail of the space, but to the preferences and tastes of the soon
to be arriving guests:
“In the case of this
exhibition, PraiseSongs for the Numinous, and these artists presented we
had to, as curators, build a familiarity with the artist, the work, and
its context in the artists’ world to know just where that
intentionality was. There are common threads here, but possibly the most
common one is that of animism, the belief in spirit contained in
organic and inorganic objects.”
The cohesivity of the show
gives rise to this collective animism which pervades the space like a
unified voice, a voice both old and recognizable yet palpably new and
invigorating. What might pass as a collection of anthropological finds
en route to a museum of history, the sculptures collected here carry a
weight of the past with them despite being so recently crafted. The
dynamic animism which the curators so rightly saw in the artists they
brought together is an animism of mythical spirit, an energy of old
which makes the works feel like sacred relics that were uncovered rather
than produced. For some of the artists, this feeling of discovery
opposed to production for the purpose of sale is intrinsic to the
pieces; Gregory Van Maanen’s amulets were not made for sale but as gifts
to family and friends as objects of healing: “they are extensions of
his intimate observations of Nature and its occult unpredictabilities.”
Kevin Sampson’s works, too, are meant to be amulets; they’re the “spirit
yards of the south in miniature,” tiny representations of a larger,
sweeping feeling meant to preserve and pay homage to communal memory.
The curators call Mark
Perez’ work “messengers,” as if their existence isn’t the ‘art’ or
finished products themselves, but simply a means of conveying a larger
experiential message to whomever happens to stumble across them. It’s
for this reason, this sense of conveyance opposed to the explicit
itinerary of selling, which makes the exhibition feel both unassuming
and inviting. Ghyslaine and Sylvain Staelens’ sculptures reign over a
“mystical landscape,” being more about “the voices in the woods:
gypsies, pagans, witches,” than they are about the contemporary
environment in which they’re situated. In this sense, all of the artists
embody this sense of space/time displacement, or a place of
“timelessness” which the curators themselves admit to trying to bring
about in the exhibition. They say “we wanted to show work that moved
backwards as well as forward temporally.” The show certainly succeeds,
and the movement (the animas, spirit, and animism) makes it worthwhile
to spend the time in the gallery’s space, which may or may not feel like
a time in the present.
New sculpture by Jane Wheeler, Phyllis
Sullivan, Tim Rowan, Melanie Ferguson, Monique Rutherford, Sarah
Purvey, Kevin Sampson, Gregory Van Maanen, Guillaume Couffignal, Sylvain
Corentin, Marc Perez, Sandra Sheehy, and Ghyslaine and Sylvain Staelens
are on view now at PraiseSongs for the Numinous at Cavin-Morris Gallery
at 210 Eleventh Ave., Suite 210. The show continues through April 26,
2014.
- Amie Zimmer
All photos courtesy of Cavin-Morris Gallery
Posted on 04.07.14
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