| Flow, Broadway Gallery’s mid-summer group show organized by independent curator, Christine Kennedy, was a delightful example of the successful translation of a simple concept into a sumptuous and multilayered statement. Boasting a roster of remarkable international artists, including Cynthia Lawson Jarmillo, Ronda Johanessen, Beate Landen, Annie Leist, and Kirt Markle, Flow documents alternative interpretations of the title concept from a variety of perspectives both theoretical and instinctive. From the conceptualization of “the flows of desire” of Deleuze and Guattari to “flow theory” as proposed by the positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the essence of “flow” in the exhibition, revolves around the concepts of fluid forces, human urges, festishistic duplication, nomadic systems, and currents and their interruptions. | 
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Simone Cappa on the Flow exhibition at Broadway Gallery.
Courtesy of Beate Landen.Flow, Broadway Gallery’s mid-summer group show organized by independent curator, Christine Kennedy, was a delightful example of the successful translation of a simple concept into a sumptuous and multilayered statement. Boasting a roster of remarkable international artists, including Cynthia Lawson Jarmillo, Ronda Johanessen, Beate Landen, Annie Leist, and Kirt Markle, Flow documents alternative interpretations of the title concept from a variety of perspectives both theoretical and instinctive. From the conceptualization of “the flows of desire” of Deleuze and Guattari to “flow theory” as proposed by the positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the essence of “flow” in the exhibition, revolves around the concepts of fluid forces, human urges, festishistic duplication, nomadic systems, and currents and their interruptions.
The latter is smartly dealt with in Jaramillo’s Outsidein, a color photograph diptych taken in urban public spaces that challenges and confuses the notion of boundaries between interior and exterior spaces. Masterfully executed to ramp up the psychological power of her compositions, these works investigate the curious ways a simultaneously transclucent and reflective material such as glass allows for a partial disruption of the flow of visual information, while also offering a partial enhancement of that very same flow.
Deleuze and Guattari describe a world in which everything flows and everything is made of flows—not just the obvious, like water, air, blood, or paint, but also ideas, people, culture, books, and conversations. Like Jaramillo, it is in this spirit that Leist works, investigating manifestations of urban public space—such as crosswalks, sidewalks, intersections, and scaffolding—as a framework through which city life and people flow. “Cityspace expands and collapses,” she explains. “It can be shaped or distorted by those who pass through it. It hosts simultaneously, paradoxically, countless isolated individuals as well as the single surging organism of the crowd.”
While Leist investigates such urban flows, Flagg examines the impact of such flows on the natural environment. His brightly-hued Pop abstractions depicting flowing lines and curving interconnecting webs also aim to represent the concepts of tracking data, trends, and information.
By contrast, the flow of the instinctive human drive is what Beate Landen contends with on the surfaces of her subtle, yet highly sophisticated abstractions. Both primitive and restrained, these luminous and hazy compositions scrawled on in a calligraphy of sensuous mark-making are executed in a minimal palette of whites, blacks, and beiges. Like Jaramillo, she also confronts the obstruction of flows in her presentation of a coded surface below which the viewer is barred entry.Like, Landen, Johanessen pursues formalist abstraction, but from the point of departure of naturalism and photography. Compelling in their stark simplicity and enigmatic nature, her color photographs depict the detailed close-up framings of meticulously woven feathers. These images attest to the high level concentration and focus, limited field of concentration, and merging of action and awareness present in Csíkszentmihályi’s description the psychological experienced of “flow”.
In much the same way, Kirt Markle investigates the fetishistic flow of fragmentation and reassembly. A self-taught artist, he creates image puzzles from his own die-cut, interlocking puzzle shapes that deconstruct and reconstruct complex and compelling images of a variety of subjects.
In concert, the work of these accomplished artists creates an electric power that flows through the exhibition space, charging the room with a circuit of waning and waxing energy. Flow is not just a stream, it creates a vibration. At Broadway Gallery Flow has generated some very good vibrations, indeed.
