ARTe MEDIA: Mar 16, 2009

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Wilfrid ALMENDRA, Mat COLLISHAW, Nick DEVEREUX, Cyprien GAILLLARD, Haris EPAMINONDA, Lorna MACINTYRE, David MALJKOVIC, Przemek MATECKI, Sergei PARAJANOV, Lisa OPPENHEIM and Ian TWEEDY

Opening on Wednesday, March 18, 7 pm to 9 pm
On view until May 9, Wednesday to Saturday, 2 pm to 7 pm

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is Sergei PARAJANOV (1924–1990)'s first major movie, which in 1964 earned the Soviet-Armenian filmmaker national fame and international acclaim.
Telling the dramatic story of peasants in the Ukrainian Carpathians, this feature movie is both a detailled ethnographic testimony and a masterpiece of visual innovation. Breaking free from socialist realism official themes and aesthetics, PARAJANOV expresses his poetic vision through various experiments, from the use of colors to represent moods like struggle against destiny to hectic images, or the strong symbolism of religious and folk images.
It is such a highly personal and contemporary reinterpretation of elements from the past that echoes with the various approachs of the exhibiting artists.

Bugada & Cargnel :: Exhibitions :: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors :: Press release

Mountain Fold is pleased to announce the exhibition of work by David Aron and Shawn Thornton, entitled “Upward Streams in a Fathom-Long Body”. The show consists of paintings, sculpture and installations that draw upon geometry and archetypal symbolism to consider the association and disentanglement of physical and abstract things.
David Aron’s pieces express an amorphous, transparent, and minimalist blueprint of coming undone. Using a geometric language, whose structure is akin to musical free-form, Aron’s integrated compositions present the phenomenon of arising and passing away, a cycle that reflects multi-layered verses of nature. An ovular painting, “plum”, iterates a shape that is at once architectural
and figurative against a muted magenta background, while ornamental details populate the foreground. The shape appears thematically throughout Aron’s work; it intimates structural support and human gesture. This piece, as well as his other paintings and sculpture, Aron developed by improvising towards a working constellation.
Shawn Thornton began his body of work as a means of demystifying the mechanisms of illness, and in order to both comprehend and reveal the visionary current that ran through his experience of brain cancer in his pineal gland, and its effects. His paintings, which foreshadowed the discovery of a tumor at the center of his brain, are intricate webs with spatial and visual abstractions, pre-historic and pre-modern art, eastern philosophy, and computer aesthetics woven together.
“Black Pyramid Meditation” connotes both a caricatured factory, wherein every person and thing has its necessary place and function, and also a chart of Yogic transcendence through visionary introspection, reverence, and a universal symbolism.
Aron and Thornton construct ephemeral designs that suggest alternately a cosmic plan, and a condition of unraveling. Vivid patterns, quotidian shapes, common symbols and figures form an architectural pastiche that map or monumentalize the circuitous ebb and flow of natural processes.

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