ISSUE #5
RYAN FONTAINE — REPETITION IS CHANGE:::ECSTATIC/RESTRAINED
This exhibition of new work takes place in a time when the suspect nature of truth itself seems to have moved from the pages of some dense, deconstructionist philosophy book and landed on our screens for all to see clearly. At this political moment everything exists within this frame and art, and this show, are no exception. Many of the themes and strategies I am interested in take root in this idea and are on full display in “Repetition is Change, Ecstatic:::Restrained”.
This is my fascination with how analog duplication can decay or alternately hold its integrity. This is how it can scale up and shift or remain firm and how this variance of scale disrupts the viewer’s connection to an image and alters its meaning. What is the minimum of information necessary to create a charged field of view, and also how saturated can it be before losing the charge?
How does the confluence of elements, even in their starkness and simplicity, combine with other elements to create a depth of experience more than the sum of its parts and dependent on what the viewer brings to it as well?
How can a rectangle be the field of play and not be played out in 2017? I’m thinking of the three dimensionality of these objects and I’m thinking of these objects relative to each other, and the room, and you.
I like the rectangle. I like that frame of perspective and focus of attack, but in letting it go I still call myself a painter. This is painting as sculpture and painting as installation. There’s something powerful in mistaking an object, a thing, for something else, and the shock of realizing that mistake. That sudden strange realization of the fallacy of perception is what I am endlessly chasing
By Ryan Fontaine
KRISTIN VAN LOON — REPETITION IS CHANGE:::ECSTATIC/RESTRAINED
Respect for the tenacity of the Shen Yun Street Team. Speculation about their methods; ability to negotiate poster placements in businesses that rarely display. And hitting all the typical cork boards and brochure racks. The social contract. How to be classy and broad and targeted in inviting. My favorite holiday is “Fall Back”. My favorite season in “Shen Yun Season”. Eat Street. Fuck social media. Looking at what you want to look at. Free paper. High quality paper. Crisp folds. Gloss. Pastels. The worst colors. Watching the colors I hate become the colors I love. Fashion. Wearing Shen Yun’s palette. 2016 = yellow and pink. 2017 = green and orange. Fabergé. The personal ethics of swiping. Never take all. An inch from each stack piling up in my apartment. Living on Nicollet. Scanning the environment for the stand-out, for the ubiquitous. A skill developed as a geologist. The pink pebbles in the gravel telling you you’re downhill from Pike’s Peak. Mom stealing soaps from hotel carts. Mom’s dossier of brochures for the family road trip. Mom made Triple-A Trip-tychs for a summer job. Mom navigating road-trips: the AAA maps spiral bound and folding out to the top, to the side. Every stop a McDonalds. Coca Cola. Shoot every Coke logo. Robert Irwin’s Coca Cola connoisseurship. The mis-remembered story of Warhol’s drippy Coke bottle. The swag boxes from Hollywood in the BLB employee break room: picked though enormous t-shirts, plastic wrapped 100-packs of posters, novelty pencils and chapsticks slathered in titles of movies that Need A Boost. Blunt instrument targeted marketing. Looser than pop-up ads. Loose. Clunky. British Pop. US Pop. Measure. Ethics of excerpt. Stutter. Sample. Remix. Dance track. Repetition vs. change. Thread. Through compose. Cinema. Closure. Animation with the dancers’ action unchanging. Brochure choreography. A leg is both a stick and a circle. Bump into window frame and wrap back, bump into door frame, wrap back. Splash Piece. Honor the architecture. Rule break. Splash Piece Splash Piece. Cate Balanchett. Superlatives. Cut by content. Cut by color. Verso. Sleeves extend. All the yellow legs displaced and make holes. Arabesque. Rite of Spring. I will strike it by spooling. Ah the light blue. TV’s in bars. Image square cut into image space. Why does Seattle get a different edit of the Cate Blanchette quote? Limited resources. A desperate plea to Portland. Ballet Russe trainstop tour. Make in fragments in another room. Backyard commute. My transition from glue stick to scotch tape was around 2015. Adhesion anxiety. Go with what you know. Thank god I forgot to look again at Hirschhorn. Glassy floor. Slip on shoes, slip off shoes. Cunningham collection. Aby Warburg. Library. Primary Source. Limited resources. Stay with the material. Pollute only once so far. Decorate around it. Eyeball. Ballpark. Tape measure technique. Getting better. Keeping it all. Theatrical lighting. A bar TV up there in the corner.
Sean Smuda writes about Fontaine/Van Loon “Repetition Is Change:::Ecstatic/Restrained”
No, melt the couch into a gong and dive in, do it again. Between the states of moving and seeing a glaze, the flies glaze over. Minimalism is breath, center ear’s dislocation and mark the days. Heaven, Horizon, Earth. A dream: how to dance with no space.
Inner and outer body hard time in perspective or three black snakes across a frozen field ripped by drone. 8.5 tons of plastic per second. A beach. Did you read it? Right through the utter inability to celebrate as it makes, it makes silence for everything outside the box. ESP the couch.
The transparent house, hung with lead and mortar, off gasses allergies.
Everything was sign and a hammer came down.
Better what’s not, but between.
Bondage to flex forever unknown, unnamed, wild gifts.
Ecstatic somatic, put on notice. Everything fades and into final acquisition. Bob on bob. Brow, sing, station. Move a couch, tiger.
air… remove all words around it.