HOW SOME PAINTINGS ARE BORN

Christine Nguyen, Susanna Maing, Lauralee Pope

November 15, 2014 – January 10, 2015 | press release

ABOUT

Baik Art presents How Some Paintings Are Born, an exhibition by three southern California artists, Christine Nguyen, Susanna Maing and Lauralee Pope, who offer their insights through the medium of paint.

Each of the artists in this exhibition has embarked on a great experiment. It’s not like they are jumping off of cliffs without parachutes or in laboratories surrounded by viruses while creating cures for weird diseases, but they are actively seeking new ways of thinking by challenging themselves with their own self-constructed problems to solve. While each artist’s production method is not merely focused on studying and representing the social relationship between artist and viewer, it does, however, rely on circumstances generated by the art maker and that maker’s connection to process, history and the world of ideas. Every individual studio practice is a form of understanding how developments and materializations are performed and endorsed by the initiator. All of those initiators—the artists in this show—pick up on their own philosophical perspectives while noting how theoretical foundations and the suppositional systems built on them are always subject to a shifting topography—they are always in motion.

Christine Nguyen has progressed from her earlier interest in using drawings on Mylar as negative material through which to project light to make photographic prints—the transformation of drawings into photographs—to her more recent way of working. Now, she effectively replicates the look of those prints, but this time she uses spray paint (the kind found in aerosol cans) to make them. Each artwork is less planned than before, so the productive journey is negotiated without any intermediary drawings. The new work is haunted by the production methods of artists like Jules Olitski (1922-2007) whose groundbreaking spraypaint works from the 1960s were concerned with laying down atmospheric blankets of colored spray on canvas. Over time, his work advanced through the added use of clarified shape, value quality and color intensity and their relationships to the painting’s spatial development and illusion of three-dimensional form. In Nguyen’s case, this all occurs, except that numerous childhood trips on her father’s commercial fishing boat also impacts the work.