The group exhibition Cusp presents four contemporary artists who independently work in the space between the known and the unknown. The artworks are in flux as paintings transform into sculptures, works on paper evoke memories, and three-dimensional installations recite poetry. The artists never quite settle into any one realm but remain ambiguous within an ever-shifting environment.
Brian Dickerson's paintings are structured from aggregated surfaces, rich with energetic brushwork that envelops his angular, constructed elements. With numerous raised edges that act as bridges, tunnels, and apertures, Dickerson’s paintings take on three-dimensional forms as silhouettes transform in the ambient light. The shadows cast by these constructions contribute to a shifting, impermanent quality of unique experiences. At once ancient and contemporary, Dickerson’s sculpted paintings combine matter's solidity with light's inconstancy, forming interactions with the surrounding space.
Melinda Stickney-Gibson's delicate drawings, paintings, and installations meditate on memory. Cryptic phrases, trembling lines, and blurred forms emerge through layers of glowing wax, paper, and paint. Books, and more specifically pages, are containers for thoughts and dreams analogous to the relationship between the solid body and the intangible mind. Cryptic phrases, trembling lines, and blurred forms emerge through glowing layers of wax, paper, and paint, much as conscious thought morphs into spontaneous imagination before sleep.
Millicent Young’s hair, wood, and clay installations create contemplative spaces for reflecting on personal and collective loss. Drawing on humble materials, Young weaves, sculpts, and scribes metaphors rooted in ancient archetypes while sounding an alarm about a fragile future. Her artworks range from lightweight suspended sculptures with descending waves of illuminated horsehair to motion-activated sound sculptures that recite poetry. In Young’s work, nature is abstracted to its distilled essence; the thousands of sinuous horsetail hairs, painstakingly woven into grapevines and wood, glow through the surrounding darkness.
As visual poets, Dickerson, Stickney-Gibson and Young capture the transformations from what is seen to what is felt. Each artist independently opens portals between the concrete and the intuitive worlds, inviting us to tolerate ambiguities and follow them through. Their contemplative artworks dwell on the edges of consciousness and, using simple, plain materials, evoke the metaphors of silent poetry.
-Jen Dragon
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