Edwin J. Gunn, Ron Janowich, Marthe Keller, Joyce Kim

The artists represented here share an interest in incipient form, in an image that seems to have been arrested at a pregnant, fruitfully ambiguous moment in the process of coming into being. In their work, complex, charged spaces arise from an idiosyncratic approach to process and materials.

Edwin J. Gunn disperses pastels in looping tracings of mineral oil, roughly reiterating those polychrome zeroes with metallic acrylic inks. Barely moored to the edges of the sheet, Gunn’s sweet nothings float as if in amniotic fluid. A deceptively simple compositional structure provokes the anxiety of interior versus exterior, inclusion versus exclusion, the face in the mirror.

Ron Janowich photographs the jet-black, high-gloss surfaces of his paintings with the intervention of a model, and the interference of ambient light. Evidence of the model’s presence is literally reflected in the paint, accentuating an essential characteristic of the viewer’s body-centric experience of these paintings.

Dismantling and reshuffling Minimalist space, Marthe Keller replaces the severity of the stripe with a sensuous, recursive stroke. Her multiple overlays inhabit sculptural as well as pictorial space, and skewer venerable Modernist “figure/ground” issues. Keller’s cheeky but exacting attitude toward craft adds a distinctly impure touch of slapstick.

Her interest in film has led Joyce Kim to investigate “scenic opacity,” or the emotional potential of illegibility within constructs typically reserved for description if not spectacle: the movie screen and the stretched canvas. In her visually confounding scenarios, tactility steps in; Kim’s jagged, feathery drawings conflate traces of the brush and photographs of dead birds.

These artists derive rather than contrive their work’s rhythm and traction, through the peculiarity and specificity of their improvisational, open-ended procedures. The risk of failure is ever present, but Gunn, Janowich, Keller and Kim seem preternaturally equipped to snatch form from the jaws of the void. As artifacts of that confrontation with chaos, their work is authentic, disarmed, and a bit alien, as if it just crawled out of the mouth of a cave, dazed and blinking in the hot flat light.

Stephen Maine