Tag: Pt. 2 Gallery

A mixed media work of two human-ish figures rendered in a quilted blanket, embellished with acrylic paint. The figures' forms are abstracted, wiggly, and made of brightly patterned fabric. Flowers and butterflies surround them.

Snail Shell: Maria Guzmán Capron & Rachel Hayden

pt. 2 Gallery is pleased to present Snail Shell, a collaborative exhibition of new work by Maria Guzmán Capron and Rachel Hayden. The exhibition juxtaposes Hayden’s acrylic paintings with Guzman Capron’s textile wall sculptures to investigate the relationship between physiognomy, emotional state, and the idea of home.

Guzmán Capron’s composite figures exist in a state of movement and flux. Their heads often contort against their bodies, with expressive gestures and faces that are open to interpretation. Meanwhile, Hayden’s subjects gaze back at the viewer, fixed and motionless in the center of the canvas. Each artist uses repeated images and textures and reassembles them in different ways in various works. Guzmán Capron uses fragments of old clothing, drapery, and textile to create figures and frames that withhold them. Hayden’s composes and recomposes motifs of butterflies, anthuriums, celestial bodies, and faces as a means to understand psychological space.

In shimmering, vivid tones of cadmium orange, light phthalo green, and light ultramarine, Rachel Hayden rearranges recurring images, documenting her transformative journey from anxiety to joy. Flowers, butterflies, and rainbows often grace her transcendental paintings, floating in space atop lush horizons full of twinkling stars or deep allusions to twilight. These symbols of beauty and transformation are grounded by faces, sometimes in clear human forms, others in composite images with the flowers and butterflies. While the symbols are light objects indicative of joy and beauty, they do entail struggle and perseverance to reach that moment of joy – the butterfly must transform from the caterpillar, the rainbow must wait out the storm and the flower must blossom.

 

A rough, grey, ceramic and porcelain sculpture of a stylized head. The rectangular face has faint, almond-shaped eyes, two horns on the top of the head, with a deep split between the horns extending down to the nose. The head's mouth is a hole that extends through the center of the sculpture.

Kyle Lypka & Tyler Cross: I Surrender

Words by gin hart.

Some words have surprising origins. Surrender isn’t one of them. Its roots are Old French for “over” (sur-) and “give back, present, yield” (rendre). Blatant pieces of a blatant first principle. Large as these stones, a white flag waving.

I see the boys surrender and I’m like…. wow.

Natural magnetism. On knees as a kind of true north. The compass falls into the clay, and they dive in after it, cede without shame to the tickling mercy of continuous opening.

The boys peel back/into the layers of entangled embodiment to excavate a dyad body, which begs improbable feats of translation. They imprint their will below the hard-packed ground of linear time.

Some units being passed back and forth for softening and shaping:

Ideas; sketches; clay; spit; effort; the possibility of function → manifold possibility beyond function.

Begging your pardon but the veil of is/is not gains radical pentrabilty. Like in a superhero movie when an interdimensional portal opens and the data of all that-is keeps scrambling and re/spawning before your very eyes.

Some other notes I jotted: Chewing gum. Phagocytois. Fruity pebbles. Jaunty cock. Flecked mutual traces. Mark-making becoming. Burbling and unruly vessel. Fuck brings the light. 

Emergent and languageless mysteries (feelings???) form and harden in the literal kiln, plus the particular heat of consensus reality. Tyler speaks of home. Kyle speaks of existence beyond space and time. I see it. .

This body isn’t somber. Here’s sculpture as metamorphic laughter: the miracle of plurality that makes love; the miracle of love’s ability to take mere mortals to meet their ancients.

Let’s not overcredit an olden day. If you feel a certain joy, upon viewing an Attic painted vase — nude-penised musculatures entangled in what could be melee but could be sex — it’s good to also note that homosexual sex was encouraged among ancient Greek soldiers because it boosted their morale and made them better fighters. In this house, things lose their spark of romantic dignity when they serve matrices of repression.

So, “I Surrender” has ancience at seed, yet actively rejects the warlike. The boys have peeled off from the scene, walked away hand in hand. Morale is for worthier and more pleasurable things: learning to collaborate, expanding that .

Eros at work reifies love. But the world is urgent. And lately it’s like… to what extent can art be an effector? As much as love and art cut sacred shapes in us, we must simultaneously surrender to the needs of this urgent world.

Twinned (twined) thought process:

1) Art, like love, is nourishing and deeply human.

2) Art, like love, doesn’t make us “good” or “right”.

. Surrender begets surrender. Yes.