Zeitgeist Gallery
CURATED by Gilda Snowden
M.Saffell Gardner, Alvaro Jurado, Jocelyn Rainey, Gilda Snowden
through June 16th, 2007

In some ways curating an exhibition has a lot in common with writing. A collection of great works or words do not a great show or essay make. It’s the relationships between the works, the words that hold it all together. Attention to transitory passages between works as between words all help take the viewer, the reader, through the desired journey of discovery. The curator/writer moves his or her audience through the experience by way of signposts, markers, or other wayfinding elements, explicitly or implicitly expressed. In putting together M. Saffell Gardner, Alvaro Jurado, Jocelyn Rainey, alongside herself, Gilda Snowden has created an exhibition of four distinct bodies and passages of work that allows for the viewer to make connections between them and gain a more whole picture of abstraction in the process.

We’ll start our tour with M. Saffell Gardner’s pattern-based highly geometric abstractions, all charged with bright color. Snaking bands of color run like tire treads over splashed wave fronts of concentric circles, intermingled with a saw-toothed series of diamond forms. The work is quite flat, with forms applied in distinct layers. While it’s certainly non-representational, the forms suggest perhaps tree rings, fingerprint sworls, geometric models of DNA, high-tension power lines with electro-magnetic waves emanating from them. To extend the latter analogy further, the work could be a color-enhanced diagram imaging of the fields of electro-magnetism all around us both naturally occurring and manmade. These are visually electric – Gardner creates a great play of movement through his compositions, an energetic dance for the eye to enjoy.

From this dance, we move to the celebratory compositions of curator Snowden. Her work shares some common vocabulary with Gardner in terms of color and the layering of paint, and even a bit of the geometry – circles and triangles abound. But after these similarities, they begin to diverge in more significant ways. Geometry unravels in favor of recognizable symbols – a chair, an eye, flowers – all leaning toward the more pictorial and constructing the hint of a narrative throughout. There are stories unfolding here. Where Gardner’s liveliness is expressed quietly, feeling more internal, Snowden’s are bold, they speak their tales in a loud voice. She achieves this with paint put down thick, viscous, possessing a substantial, physical presence, almost a body, beyond their color and form.

Jocelyn Rainey’s paintings leap still further into the third dimension, nearly approaching the sculptural. While any adherence to the geometric is absent, Rainey’s overall compositions share some of the flow of movement with Gardner, as well as with Snowden. These are the dynamic boundaries between land and water, both elements pushing and pulling on the other – chaotic terrain. Metaphorical imagery perhaps for one’s life – echoed by the elements that make up her surfaces, all discarded tools of painting – containers, rags, scraps of blue jeans, brushes, gloves – strewn about, like a tornado picked them up and dropped them there. It’s a textured, almost mountainous surface upon which she applies fields of pure color. The objects carry meaning and content as Snowden’s symbols do. There’s also the very much Detroit aesthetic in terms of transforming the discarded into the beautiful. Many strong passages, like this one: the impression of a red glove, printed flat in a rumpled area of purple, as if to say even in the midst of this frenetic activity, we can still hold things together enough to put our stamp, our signature on it.

Departing completely from the flat to the sculptural, we come to the final artist Alvaro Jurado. As Rainey reused painting articles, Jurado takes tools, interior architectural elements, relics of times past, recontextualizing them into new objects. Ornate wooden cornices from mantels and the like, signifiers of an era when construction had character and not just drywall, all mingled with the very tools to build them. The works range from smaller wall-mounted pieces and almost altar-like objects, to a few larger, free standing, Modernist sculptures in appearance, (though postmodern in composition of scrap materials.) In a few of the works he preserves the original look of the objects, but primarily he’s repainted them in solid red, silver, or gold – this mask of paint helps to completely subsume the identity of the elements within the composition. They’ve become satisfying, whole objects in their own right, as well as in considering their source elements.

While we’ve seen each of the artists, this does not mean the journey has simply come to an end. It’s not so linear of a trip. The movement of the eye through Jurado’s mash-up objects speaks very much to Gardner’s layered geometric forms. What’s achieved in flatness through multiple colors occurs through physical forms all of a solid color. Similar connections abound throughout the different works, and each new path we take between previously seen material allows for further discovery. It’s a consistent show, with each body of work informing the other, making for an ultimately quite satisfying visual experience.

Zeitgeist should be commended for a strong and quite varied season offering up diverse exhibitions including its stable of “outsider” artists, reaching out to installation work, and now this externally curated show. – Nick Sousanis
ws@thedetroiter.com