Wintermirror 5

Comment

Comment by David Moss on February 13, 2023 at 11:42am

Kristen,

Thank you again for the wonderful insight in your response to this work. I am particularly interested in your comments about "natural systems", the "unseen world", and suggestions of sound and movement with references to swarming bees and flocks of birds. This all touches on a goal of evoking more of a totality of experience that synthesizes appearances, sensations, thought, and memory. In the end though, one always hopes that it is as you said, the "inexplicable" that remains.

Comment by Resident Curator on February 11, 2023 at 12:41pm

Curator's Comments:

 

Thank you for sharing your new work to the site!  I’m blown away by the transformation in your work since you last posted, back in 2014.  While I can clearly see your hand in these new pieces, visceral paint seems to have given way to cooler, digital processes.  I find this particularly remarkable as I had considered your painting practice very much about process and your haptic connection with raw materials.  These new Wintermirror prints evoke some of the same macrocosmic relationships between natural systems, and the complex human connection to the unseen world.  The rather large physical size of the pigment prints likely affords them a more commanding, and enveloping presence that what I’m experiencing on a computer screen.                        I view the elliptical shapes as eyes in the piece designated number 5.  The form a visually moving pattern suggesting both individuals and a collective, as experienced in a hypnotizing murmuration of birds, or bees swarming a hive.  Moving through the series to number 11, the eye shape morphs into a portal of sorts- an all-seeing eye belonging to a branching tree form, animating the form, and suggesting sentience.  Of course, these literal interpretations are clumsy, as they remove the realm of possibilities in the intended abstraction.  It is perhaps the inexplicability of the images that are the root essence of the attraction.