Sasha Opeiko, detail from Caput Mortuum, 2014.
“aswemaythink” by Scott Carruthers (Toronto ON) oil marker on mylar, 2014 5 feet x 58 feet (appx.)
An immersive drawing installation on five foot wide mylar sheets that wrap around the wall of the gallery. Although alluding to different forms of storytelling (manuscripts, codex, comics), the work itself is devoid of traditional narrative structure; no beginning, ending or casual connection between images.
“Using a process based on writing techniques of the Surrealists, I draw automatically and continuously, using chance and free association to suggest the next image. When I am drawing, there is no conscious theme to my work; my goal is simply to make a new image each time.
For the past twelve years I have been exploring the notion of information as environment. In an attempt to create an immersive “world” that can be experienced both cognitively and physically, I fill a site with thousands of drawings. Although alluding to different forms of storytelling (manuscripts, codex and comics), the work itself is devoid of traditional narrative structure. There is no beginning, ending or causal connection between images.
In “aswemaythink”, the goal was to create a work that exists somewhere between narrative and landscape. It is also meant to evoke a tension between sequential narrative and a kind of “all-at-once-ness”, a term that Marshall McLuhan used to describe the experience of living in a media- saturated, digital environment. This work invites a new kind of reading from the viewer, with pattern recognition playing as big a role as traditional narrative interpretation.” -Scott Carruthers
More at: http://scottcarruthers.com/
The artist wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council.
“Caput Mortuum” by Sasha Opeiko (Windsor ON) Mixed Media Installation, 2012-2014 dimensions variable
Conjoined series of oil paintings on metal and painted found objects and their painted “skins”. The alchemical term “Caput Mortuum” calls to mind a dead object that may still be revived or transformed into a new mode of existence.
“The alchemical term caput mortuum refers to refuse matter that has been stripped of its worldly function. The exhibition handles this idea with found objects that are withdrawn from utility – bones, moldy bread, crumpled foil, trash or roadside ruins. The objects can be interpreted as melancholic, inherently inaccessible and self-referential.
The reflective space of the metallic ground acts as a neutral decontextualized field. Each object is singularly condensed into an epidermal surface of its image. Paint is considered here as a surface built to contain itself, coagulating matter into the illusion of stillness. The paintings suggest mimetic replication but they are not accurately reproduced. They approximate self-reflexivity as a symptom and a method of melancholic introversion, as if the object is imitating itself, its image falling away or castrated from its corporeal form.
“No longer a phantasm and not yet a sign, the unreal object of melancholy introjection opens a space that is neither the hallucinated oneiric scene of the phantasms nor the indifferent world of natural objects.” Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 25.
“The alchemical or artistic work is strangely inside, and the human mind that directs it is also partly its inert substrate. What was once the agent of conceptual control over the work has become the bricks of its furnace… The furnace produces a product that is the furnace, and the mind tries to watch a process that is the mind.” Elkins, James. What Painting Is. New York: Routledge, 2000. 166. -Sasha Opeiko
More at: http://sashaopeiko.com/