Workspace

Start Here

December 11 through February 5, 2017
Opening reception: December 11, 2016, 6-8pm

Start Here (installation view). Image #341
Start Here (installation view). Image #342
Start Here (installation view). Image #343
Start Here (installation view). Image #344
Start Here (installation view). Image #351
Kaye Mahoney, "Annagramatical Reincarnation", 2016, oil on canvas, 12 x 18 x .... Image #323
Kaye Mahoney, "Station Mark #1 (43°52'23.6"N 7°05'27.01"E)", 2016, oil on can.... Image #331
Kaye Mahoney, "Alternative Impression", 2016, Oil on canvas, 9 x 24 x 1.5 inc.... Image #288
Kaye Mahoney, "Tattoo - Yo Man", 2016, oil, ink, and line tape on canvas, 12 .... Image #328
Kaye Mahoney, "Heavy Words - event score", 2016, mixed media, pencil on panel.... Image #329
Kaye Mahoney, "Deadly Swoosh", 2016, Acrylic, postcard and glue on canvas,12 .... Image #291
Kaye Mahoney, "Gymnopédie", 2016/2009 Water colour and pencil on hand made pa.... Image #305
Kaye Mahoney, "Balanced Philosophy (by deduction"), 2016, Oil on canvas, 12 x.... Image #289
Kaye Mahoney, "Fleurs Imaginaires (grâce à Vuillard)", 2016, Oil on canvas, 1.... Image #292
Kaye Mahoney, "Massively Grave", 2016, mixed media assemblage, oil on Plexigl.... Image #330
Kaye Mahoney, "Rechargeable Power", 2016, Mixed media: acrylic, torch, paintb.... Image #294
Kaye Mahoney, "Studio Mnemonic", 2016, Oil on canvas, Dimensions: 12 x 24 x 1.... Image #282
Kaye Mahoney, "Heavy Words - event score", 2016, Mixed media, pencil on panel.... Image #293
Kaye Mahoney, "White Lie - slowly turning grey", 2016, oil on canvas, 12 x 18.... Image #332
Kaye Mahoney, "Read This", 2016, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 16 x 24 x 1.5 inc.... Image #308
Kaye Mahoney, "Leaves of a Book", 2016, Oil on canvas, 12 x 18 x 1.5 inches (.... Image #306
Kaye Mahoney, "Leaves of a Book" (closed view), 2016, Oil on canvas, 12 x 18 .... Image #307
Kaye Mahoney, "Random Acts of Peace", 2016, oil and acrylic on canvas, 12 x 1.... Image #333
Kaye Mahoney, "Drip Music event score - homage à George Brecht", 2016, acryli.... Image #334
Susan Mikula, "Picture Book #3", 2013, Archival pigment print on Awagami Kozo.... Image #350
Susan Mikula, "Picture Book #3" (detail), 2013, Archival pigment print on Awa.... Image #107
Anne Gilman, "There's always a back-story", 2016, Pencil, paint, tape on pape.... Image #286
Anne Gilman, "Naoshima", 2016, Pencil, matte medium, ink, torn paper collage .... Image #284
Anne Gilman, "Not waiting for something else to happen", 2016 Pencil, charcoa.... Image #281
Susan Mikula, "u.X #46", 2014,Archival pigment print on Awagami Bizan paper, .... Image #303
Susan Mikula, "u.X #32", 2014,Archival pigment print on Awagami Bizan paper, .... Image #298
Susan Mikula, "u.X #53", 2014,Archival pigment print on Awagami Bizan paper, .... Image #324
Susan Mikula, "u.X #34", 2014,Archival pigment print on Awagami Bizan paper, .... Image #299
Susan Mikula, "u.X #31", 2014,Archival pigment print on Awagami Bizan paper, .... Image #297
Susan Mikula, "u.X #45", 2014,Archival pigment print on Awagami Bizan paper, .... Image #302
Anne Gilman, "Absence of Noise", 2016, Pencil, acrylic paint, tape on paper, .... Image #283
Anne Gilman, "Out of the blue", 2016, Pencil, charcoal, matte medium, acrylic.... Image #285
Anne Gilman, "What can and cannot be measured", 2016, Pencil, acrylic paint, .... Image #287
Susan Mikula, "Picture Book #27", 2015, Archival pigment print on Awagami Koz.... Image #295
Susan Mikula, "u.X #52", 2014,Archival pigment print on Awagami Bizan paper, .... Image #304
Susan Mikula, "u.X #24", 2014, Archival pigment print on Awagami Bizan paper,.... Image #296
Susan Mikula, "u.X #35", 2014,Archival pigment print on Awagami Bizan paper, .... Image #300

 

Start Here: Anne Gilman, Kaye Mahoney, Susan Mikula
Curated by Brian Mattlin

 

Who do we think we are? Where does our sense of self originate and how does it intersect with others and the world around us?  In the midst of a national debate over “us vs. them,” and a culture increasingly seen through a lens of identity politics, Lesley Heller Workspace presents Start Here, curated by Brian Mattlin. Featuring the work of Susan Mikula, Kaye Mahoney and Anne Gilman. Three women, three mediums, three conversations with the infinite and the intimate that explore—if not necessarily explain—how outside forces come to shape who we are, and may become. Mikula turns her gaze back and within, Mahoney expands her view out into the physical and metaphysical world, and Gilman looks up and around, responding to the challenges of the everyday, while reminding us time and again, as we must do time and again, to simply “start here.”

 

Viewers of Susan Mikula’s “u.X” photographs are often reminded of Paleolithic cave paintings. There is something powerfully primitive about them, as if we are witnessing the earliest discoveries of fire and community, but also conflict and fear. In these shadowy figures and scenes, printed on rough and heavy handmade Japanese paper, we sense an ancient narrative and a common bond. In her “Picture Book” series the iconography is more modern, more civilized, with the somehow familiar images floating on smooth, pale paper in large shadowbox frames. But the underlying emotional tone is just as atavistic. There is magic and menace in the outsized creatures and mysterious houses that populated all of our childhood stories, and still lurk in our adult subconscious. What is it we sense in these totemic archetypes? What early and seminal moments of forming consciousness?

Painter Kaye Mahoney’s experimental Libratory brews up deceptively simple concoctions of potent force, cutting through to big questions about our connections to nature, philosophy and the universe. In this iteration, a series of hinged diptychs as “books” sit closed on the shelf, with titles such as “Annagrammatical Reincarnation,” “Balanced Philosophy (by deduction),” “Red On Redon” and “Tattoo – Yo Man” visible on the spine. Taken in hand, as intended, each opens to present a meditation, a metaphor, a play on words, a riddle or even a joke. Others, such as "Massively Grave" and "Deadly Swoosh" are among her most viscerally direct explorations of mortality and our connection to the forces of nature. Throughout there are underlying concepts that speak to how we relate to each other and our world, layered on top of the intimacy of holding an artwork in your hands, of experiencing it physically; not just with the eyes and brain.  

Anne Gilman inscribes sheets and scrolls of paper with powerful, often poignant streams of consciousness; an intensely personal verbal and visual conversation between herself, her subject matter, her environment, and with language itself. Using pencils, inks, chalks and charcoals she extemporaneously writes and overwrites, erases and redacts, in English and in Spanish as the language and the moment dictate. With pieces ranging in size from a sheet of note paper to ten feet tall, the work is detail-oriented and labor intensive, often contrasting areas that are carefully controlled with sections that show process and chance. Typically starting from some memory, moment or event in her life, over time the world leaks in, outside sounds and ideas intrude, then inform, the evolution of the work. The finished product, a map of how we shape and are shaped by the world around us, can feel like a cross between a page out of your own secret diary and one from the Dead Sea scrolls.