Time / Object / Conduit 

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Time^Object^Conduit
Review by Stephen Nachtigall 

A female figure sculpted as a bust sits toward the rear of the gallery but is in clear view as you enter. She is crying. Her tears; whether of joy or sorrow, beam from the clay as tubes of blue neon that flow in two delicate arcs, landing in an ornate ceramic vessel which hearkens towards an urn or a vase, catching and collecting them for some unforeseen ritual or ceremony.

Elsewhere, abstract vessels are inundated with voids and clearances where more neon tubes escape, loop out into space and then return inwards. The ceramic vessels, monochromatic at first glance, are nevertheless painstakingly glazed with various shades of white, as if the vibrancy of these forms had somehow seeped away to leave a delicate balance of dull and reflective pale tones that actively catch the light of the space. In the rear of the gallery, collages, elegantly composed and printed on silk, hang opposite a four channel video installation. The videos act in unison to further bathe the space in blue, watery hues and patterns overlayed with image references that the ceramic vessels embody. The artist, a self-admitted child of the 80’s, paints the gallery space in neon and shades of shifting color hues which subtly blast out from party lights positioned surreptitiously atop the gallery walls.

The exhibition ebbs and flows between the timeless and the pastiche, a waveform where the negative half cycle dips down to relay archaic shapes and forms and to remind the viewer of shared elements and connection; water. If this waveform dips down into the past to remind us of these things, the inverse of that cycle bends upward toward the future, seeming to establish a scenario and a possibility in these works for aspects of ritual and ceremony to be made manifest. It is ironic that the exhibition mimics the cold blue light of the screen, the glow that reflects our contemporary networked and individualised culture. The light dispersed in object^time^conduit seems a much warmer one, bathing these objects in a glow of possibility, the potential for a broadened horizon and concurrent deference to shared origins.