Reese Inman: Ellipsis

Bryan McFarlane: New Paintings

September 5 – October 7 at Gallery NAGA

To begin its thirtieth season of exhibitions, Gallery NAGA presents two Boston-based painters - one early in her career, one recognized internationally - who have developed highly personal and idiosyncratic methods for generating their work.

Reese Inman: Ellipsis and Bryan McFarlane: Recent Paintings both run from September 5 through October 7.  A reception for the artists and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, September 8 from 6 to 8 pm.  Both artists offer free public talks about their work on Saturday, September 16, McFarlane at 2 pm and Inman at 3 pm.

Reese Inman uses paint to build mounds.  She drops a dollop, lets it dry, and then sands.  Then, on top of the first, a dollop of another color.  Then more sanding, cutting through the top layer, revealing glimmers of the first.  She repeats this quite focused activity six, eight, ten times for each nubbin of color, about ¼" in diameter, and does so for each of the thousands of such mounds in a meter-square painting, laid out in a grid of 10,000 centimeter-square boxes, 100 columns by 100 rows.

Some mounds become concentric rings of color, others solid circles flecked with contrasting color.  Sometimes the paint slides over and connects with an adjoining mound, and the two dots kiss and merge like a cell that hasn't quite divided.  All of this tiny, nuanced paint activity takes place with an overall constellation of interlocking patterns.  The arrangement is not random; it's thoroughly premeditated.

Inman designs on a Macintosh G4 computer, using software programs she writes to generate dot patterns.  She tinkers with the mathematics of her programs to evolve the patterns on her computer screen until she achieves a set of patterns she deems paintable.  A hard copy printout is affixed to her panel and becomes the painting's cartoon, her map for the constellation in which her mounds flicker and twinkle.

What are these paintings about?  Many viewers see suggestions of arrays of digital information or the flashing of lights in the city at night.  "My work is really a reflection on the relationship between humans and computers," Inman says.  "We made them, and, like our other inventions, they can distance us from each other or bring us closer.  My musings have driven me to try to create something that is evocative of both technology and the hand."

Inman's work will also be shown in January, 2007 at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in its major review of new abstraction, Big Bang.

Bryan McFarlane took a major artistic risk in his last body of work, the Egg Series, jettisoning the content for which his work had been known for twenty years.  A Jamaican by birth and an energetic traveler in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, McFarlane had become identified with work that invoked and reconstructed sacred spaces he has visited.  His paintings, exhibited internationally and at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Art here in Boston, his home since the 1980s, glowed with light and evoked places of suffering and prayer, as if to summon before us the reality of sacredness in the world.

In the Egg Series, he stepped aside from his instinct for cultural anthropology.  Using fields of color and a hyper-simplified vocabulary of egg-shaped forms, he painted works with little specific and much general reference, essentially competing as an abstract painter.  The series was a success, winning recognition beyond his previous reputation.  Currently several from the series are being shown, through October 29, in New Possessions at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC.

Now, however, within the abstract space of the Egg Series, McFarlane's longstanding forms and concerns have reappeared.  But what was previously a deliberate evocation of particular places is now a free flowing outpouring, like an unleashed id, of McFarlane's private storehouse of images.  Here one can recognize a candle, there an elemental stool form.  It's as if McFarlane has decided to work subconsciously, letting his images arrive in the compositions less from architectonic plan than from their arising in him.

McFarlane says, "I create a cluster of worlds, coming out of egg sources, which represent my deep longing and regard for the perpetuity of life mediated through peaceful means and not by war and destruction.  Beauty is an intrinsic part of this experience."