CMay Gallery proudly presents Objectivities, an exhibition bringing together three artists, David Koga, Felicity Nove, and Ann Marie Rousseau, whose art practice moves from painterly and gestural processes to objectified physical things, or else moves in the reverse direction, from the physical object, for example, Polaroids pictures, to the painterly, seemingly gestural form. Their work delays a finality of form or media, foregrounding processes that remain in flux, while still ultimately producing a visually absorbing abstract form. The opening reception will take place on June 5, 2015 from 5:00pm to 9:30pm at CMay Gallery at the Pacific Design Center.

Two of the artists begin their process with painting, or mark-making: Felicity Nove and Ann Marie Rousseau. For Rousseau this comes out of, as she describes it, her, “deep interest in line in all its manifestations—drawn, painted, and photographed.” In the work chosen for Objectivities, Rousseau employs acrylic, ink, pencil and thread on canvas or panel. Her lines are applied with enough weight and sinuous length that they are given autonomy as objects; she then multiplies the number of lines, until some parts begin to describe a new gestalt forms, while other remain separate independent lines, thus making a dialog between line as form-giver, and line for its own sake. The entire picture plane is then coated in resin, giving the painting a finished, objective quality, and effacing its origins in the hand-applied mark.

Felicity Nove applies paint by pouring it directly on aluminum panel. The paint is pooled, directed or allowed to find its own path; creamy pinks, yellows and greens merge and drift, with large expanses of bright reds and deep blues predominating the compositions. The abstraction of Nove’s poured paintings has a two-fold purpose: the process allows her to explore the material property of paint as a thing, its viscosity, its transparency, its surface quality; at the same time, her abstract composition link inner and outer, micro and macro landscapes. The artist puts it, “I see realism and abstraction as one and the same—differing only in personal focus and how one chooses to view them.” The poured paint is then coated in resin, like Rousseau, and the outline of the pour is cut out of the aluminum panel, leaving the paint to stand on its own, as an object in its own right.

Working in the opposite direction is Dave Koga. His series, In An Instant begins with photographs taken with a Polaroid camera.  Koga manipulates the emulsion of these photographs while they are developing, and scans the image several times capturing the film’s development process.  The selected prints are reproduced at a much larger scale, capturing, not a subject, but a photograph in transition. The larger scale lends the undeveloped emulsions a painterly quality allowing the work to occupy a space between painting and photography while commenting on the photography’s historical, and ongoing, relationship to painting. 

These three artists explore paint as an object, painting as a concept irrespective of material, and painting as shear process, showing the continued relevance of the medium to a variety of practices. The exhibition continues CMay Gallery’s ongoing commitment to curator-driven exhibition programming.