Mara Held Mel Kendrick Cordy Ryman Joan Waltemath Mark Williams

A Roller Coaster in the Dark is an exhibition about how artists find form in the process of creation. The artists in the exhibition, Mara Held, Mel Kendrick, Cordy Ryman, Joan Waltemath and Mark Williams have sources of inspiration ranging from Native American culture to physics. However, they share in common a highly intuitive approach to determining structure in their art.

This instinctual predisposition should not be seen as conflicting with an intellectual underpinning to their art. In the case of Waltemath, for example, the geometrical knowledge that goes into the creation of her paintings is not deterministic of the paintings’ form. It is an aid of only tangential importance to the larger mystery her totemic paintings present. Similarly, though Kendrick’s early interest in physics and ancient stone circles informs the baroque line of his sculpture, his method of working with materials from the outside in – he carves into solid blocks of wood to excavate their interiors or finds wooden husks, the natural forms of which move fluidly from interior to exterior – allows him to intuit forms indirectly.

The exhibition’stitle, A Roller Coaster in the Dark, comes from a review I wrote on Kendrick’s work and is meant to evoke the difficulty involved in the search for new forms. Recent history has it that content can exist in an artwork exterior to the process of its making. According to this thinking, an artist might, for example, comment on a particular political or cultural situation directly in a work of art. The extreme forms of this position suggest an almost journalist and abundantly literal precision to the language of art. A Roller Coaster in the Dark is about a different understanding of art, one that inseparably weds form to content and mandates and artist’s achieving this synthesis through subconscious channels. Thus an artist looks for an object’s color and formto satisfy a fundamental need and trusts that need to conform to important content.

In the case of Cordy Ryman, however, it is not so much an object that does the work as a dispersion of objects. When Ryman does make a painting, there is a sense that the elements in its composition are ready to come unhinged and move off elsewhere. That is often what they do as Ryman's work moves freely between painting and sculpture. The essence of the work is the search for aform, not the particular category - painting, sculpture or installation - into which a work falls. Similarly, Mara Held's paintings are difficult to categorize. They often bend the space of a grid forcing it into an off-kilter mold that seems to wind in on itself. She plays with painting's inherent tendency to suggest vast space. She makes the grid both form and field in which everything is a part of a continuum suggestive of a space larger than the confines of any canvas.

Mark Williams’ restrained palette and subtly varied compositions allow him to amplify the effects of slight inflections of surface and touch. Their evocation of great weight and easy movement gives them a vague quixotic quality that confounds by inviting explanation without offering clues as to what that explanation might be. There is a point in visual art at which speech fails to help us explain what we see. It is the inherent nature of most criticism and much art historical writing to ignore this. Mark Williams’ paintings, like all the work in A Roller Coaster in the Dark, affirm it.

Ben La Rocco, 2008