a circle is a thought pattern
Cecilia Dougherty / Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola / Anthony Lesliecurated by Jamie Chan
February 4 - March 5, 2022
Opening: Friday, February 5, 12-6pm
Cecilia Dougherty, from Shanidar, Safe Return, 6x9, conté crayon on paper, 2022
– Pauline Oliveros
I wanted to see a collection of artworks together that could speak about daily life and art but outside of categories or commentary, sort of like a stream of water, a walk, a place to rest the mind. Thereness, but not at all reductive. Works that communicate intimately to the viewer through stories with a soft focus. Doesn’t represent a dialog, but represents the relationship between thought process and idea formation. A circle is a thought pattern. Not fiction or nonfiction, neither formal nor informal. Works that are grounded in specific places, groups of people, and rest in fluid qualities of time. A sense of resolution that lingers.
Works not exactly being in service of “process” - not ephemera or document - but concretely living and direct. The form of the works themselves is materially lightweight, diffuse and comprises accumulated gestures, yet is emphatically manual and sourced from the materiality of life and the senses. The works also all resemble piles – larger trajectories and practices exceeding the sense of time that they exist in. These artists capture our attention in both the front and back of our minds, skillfully folding time into a narrative movement that smolders, and the implication of that movement circles us back to elemental and early experiences of the earth and of place, individuals in groups connecting back to the source. JC
Cecilia Dougherty’s small drawings (pencil and conté crayon on paper, various sizes, 2021-22) have been created as the background drawings for passages from an interactive story called “Shanidar, Safe Return,” that she is developing in Twine game software. The story and the images are inspired by several visits and much research into the Paleolithic cave art in Spain and France. The story follows Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons on a migration through France, Italy, the Balkans and southward to what is now Iraqi Kurdistan, to a site called Shanidar, the location of the well-documented Neanderthal flower burial. Cecilia Dougherty is a visual artist living in New York.
In the work of Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, two decaying leaves reveal their venation patterns where hidden traces suggest a map of movement. She brings landscape to the foreground, repeating the words root, rot and rotation in her ritual typewritings, and her drawings are made upon uneven ground. Lucía is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Mexico City, and the editor of diSONARE, an experimental editorial project. Her time-based practice explores the fluidity of language through investigative poetics, resulting in a corpus of visual, sonic, and text-based works. Her expanded poetry practice involves an engagement with the environment and collecting natural and found objects.
Anthony Leslie's 2014-22 sound diaries are the products of an ongoing daily practice that combines field recording, concentrated listening and first-person narrative. They represent an extensive and growing archive of his sound memories, mostly from his time spent living, working and caregiving in and around Los Angeles. They contain public sounds, domestic sounds, sounds from the world of nature and of music, the voices of friends, family, people on the street, poets, protestors, and others.
But I thought of this picture of my backpack and our late cat Charlie that I sent you like 5 years ago. I found it in one of our old email threads. I like it because I think of the sound diaries as sort of patchworks. And the backpack has been with me all this time. It was my work backpack on my bicycle commute for many years and now it is often a diaper bag when I take Finn to the park or the beach. Plus it has a connection to you because you sent me the first patch I put on it (the lady with the polka dot hat). I am re-sending it to you for your consideration. AL