Imploding Meaning

“Abstraction is not only about ‘no-meaning,’ it’s also about imploding meaning.” 

—CHARLINE VON HEYL

 Imploding Meaning became a focal point to discuss how our current work is read and where it fits into contemporary art discourse. Abstraction is not about nothing. The works on view explore geometric abstraction, gestural abstraction, collage, installation, and non-verbal storytelling. This show is an opportunity for each of us to center our art studio practices among our peers and explore our commonalities, or lack thereof. The works on view have their own dialect: M. (Margaret) Pettee Olsen’s is one of pure abstraction where she uses “conceptual stand-ins for contradicting and codifying thoughts.” Michael Oatman’s grid of circles containing 100 years of magazine pictures becomes an analog Instagram where viewers are invited to digest “issues of racism, class boundaries, and misogyny.” Rosanne Walsh combines nature objects and images pulled from luxury magazines with domestic items like pharmaceutical inserts and hangers. I am playing  a dual role, as both exhibiting artist and curator, and for the first time, I am allowing for a wry humor to surface in my work by using direct references and actual objects. This exhibition is not singular but does have a through line of an emboldened openness to interpretation, evoking experience and invoking a call to simply behold the work and the world. 

We are magpies, each creating archives of magical materials—Rosanne and Michael’s clipping files, Margaret’s luminescent paint, and my boat sails. Each of our bodies of work rely on how we collect, order, and imbue these materials. Many of the materials come directly from the fabric of our daily lives. The works that we make have content because of what they are made with and who makes them. However, the coolness derived from formalism is not the feeling emanating from the Palmer Gallery walls. When you enter the gallery, it feels more like Patti Smith’s idea of an “exploding collage of our culture.”

As artists we begin with an intention, and through the process of making, succumb to that particular piece’s insistence of having its own architecture and story. We invite viewers to join in the discussion through careful looking and completing the stories using their imaginations. “Consider the wordless story; with no beginning, middle or end”: a Zen koan for our times.

Monica Church

Artist/Curator