• “Peace as an Universal Language,” a exhibition at the Broadway Gallery, NY – Jamey Hecht and Kyo

    Date posted: May 1, 2006 Author: jolanta

    “Peace as an Universal Language,” a exhibition at the Broadway Gallery, NY

    Jamey Hecht and Kyong-Ha Yim

    Since art emerges from the unconscious, it affords an alternative to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that plague the waking mind each hour. But the subject matter of the same art often cries out from the center of deep social crises; it’s as if the speaker of the poem or the painter of a picture were only able to tolerate the confrontation of mundane injustice by taking shelter in the creative trance. Roman Stoic philosophers advocated the pursuit of ataraxia, the freedom from disturbing thoughts and emotions. For the artists in this group exhibition at 473 Broadway, such ataraxia is only worth having if it can help them to make art that addresses the human community’s unbearable scarcity of peace in this historical moment.

    “Peace: Universal Language,” is a group exhibition featuring Ellen
    Crofts, Sydney Drum, Anitra Haendel, Wook Heo, Naomi Hori, Mikyoung Kim, Akiko Kotani, Thomas Lipski, Meeok Paik, Hanna Seiman, Yijun Sun, and Ward Yoshimoto. Some works are direct and referential while others are oblique, abstract, formalistic; all are concerned with the yearning for an end to violence and discord.

    		  

    Amitayus (buddha) (item no. 65215) Collection of Rubin Museum of Art

    Amitayus (buddha) (item no. 65215) Collection of Rubin Museum of Art
    Anitra Haendel’s portrait of a condemned woman in a Florida prison, “Number
    842556, Death Row 1,” (oil on linen) haunts the viewer with a stare that
    combines terrible human frailty with an equally terrible, supra-human fatalism.
    It is somehow alive, though it swims with shades of black and gray. When you
    stand in front of the picture and look, you see that you’re too late. The woman
    in the portrait wants to live, but the gift of reprieve is not one the artist
    can offer. Acknowledgement is the best anyone can do for the prisoner, whose
    image comes to us from the past, a nonparticipating illegible footnote to the
    future, made ephemerally present through the personal agency of the artist. To
    take a chilling photograph, to produce an emotionally dangerous canvas, is to
    seek for peace by liberating the repressed horrors of one’s own life (transmuted
    by metaphor and substitution and synesthesia). Alice Miller’s essay on the childhood
    of Pablo Picasso is among the best exemplars of this perspective (see The Untouched
    Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness, New York: Anchor-Press,
    1992).

    Ward Yoshimoto’s “Locked” is a mixed-media installation showing two
    white birds locked in a metal cage. Attached to the cage and just beyond the
    reach of its captives hangs a set of keys. The birds are spared the dangers of
    the outside world, but thereby denied its possibilities; theirs is a troubled
    peace, matter for a difficult ambivalence.

    “Peace of Origin I” and “Peace of Origin II,” are two framed
    ink drawings about the empty and the full, by Mi-Kyong Kim. One shows a flowerpot
    upside down, the other rightside up and crowded with cursive elipses like the
    teeming root system of an absent plant. Ellen Croft raises similar issues of
    fertility and its opposite in an untitled oil painting wherein giant skeletal
    figures overlap as they emerge from a pastel background.

    Peace appears as a layered field of ultramarine in Mee-Ok Paik’s acrylic
    on canvas, “Life III.” Paik is also a performer of traditional Korean
    dance; her three-dimensional orientation is expressed here in her process of
    hand-tearing each canvas where most painters use a scissor or a utility knife.
    Like the rips and punctures in the painted panels of Kiyokatsu Masumiya, Paik’s
    strong gesture brings the otherwise volume-neutral, flat canvas into a sculptural
    dimension. The artist’s does penetrative violence to the painting its identity
    is expanded and its physical integrity is compromised. There is destruction in
    every human endeavor including art; when we don’t tear the canvas, we still grind
    the pigments, drive carpet tacks into the stretchers and kill the trees to make
    them. But Paik’s result is profoundly tranquil. The canvas has been layered with
    color, its hanging threads have been preserved and tended, and the whole is suffused
    with the kind of simmering calm that only colorfield abstraction can achieve.

    Peace is perhaps a more potent subject for a group than for an individual show,
    since it entails the coexistence of divergent approaches subsisting in the same
    space. This exhibition handsomely acquitted itself of that task.

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