Tara Donovan, Jyung Mee Park, Achim Mohné
De Tempore
November 3 - December 16, 2000
“Time must never be thought of as
pre-existing in any sense; it is a manufactured
quantity.” “A God that can be measured has to
be man-made. Revelation has no
dimensions. If it did, it would be dead in
space and time... The Fourth Dimension
is Yahweh’s wrath upon a cursed
humanity. ” The human experience of time, according
to physicist Paul Davies in About Time, his
recent popular survey of this dense topic,
falls into three distinct categories: mystical
or spiritual notions of time, Newtonian time,
and relative time. Mystical time is, in
essence, timelessness, a sense of time
divorced from ordinary, waking human
experience. It is the time we associate with
heaven or the afterworld — God’s time —
experienced on earth as the sense of time
we have when we are engrossed in an
activity, sleeping, or meditating. Next,
Newtonian time or “common sense” time is
the classic Western notion of time as linear
and clearly divisible into past, present, and
future. Finally, Einstein’s revolutionary
notion of relative time, at the risk of oversimplifying
a complicated theory, postulates that
all time — past, present, and future — exists
simultaneously.
Although most of us might instinctively
describe time in Newtonian terms, our
actual experience of time is very different
today, at the dawn of the 21st century, than
it was even a generation ago. The speed at which communication and travel now
ordinarily take place has caused us to internalize
a sense of time that is, in fact, relative.
Our abilities to fly across time zones and
converse via telephone or e-mail in “real
time” with persons who are half a day away
according to the clock literally allow us to
move back and forth in time. This exhibition, De Tempore (Latin for of time), presents the
work of three artists, Tara Donovan, Jyung
Mee Park, and Achim Mohné, who move
fluidly among these three vastly different
notions of time in developing the form and
content of their work. Tara Donovan builds large, laborintensive,
and site-specific installations for which
the bulk of the work occurs on site rather
than in her studio. Her relationship to
materials is restless and intense. Rarely
does she create more than one or two works
in any given substance; rather, she continually
searches industrial or hardware sources
for new materials to experience. Once she's
chosen her medium, Donovan devotes her
full attention and faculties to learning about
and then pushing the limits of its inherent
physical properties. Previous projects
include: a nearly three-foot-square cube of
densely packed toothpicks (Controlled Caging, 1997); a room-sized, black nappy
pelt of roofing felt (Resonance, 1998);
silvery threads of cut or unraveled electrical
cable, tangled to form a weightless, air-filled
mass (Hedge, 1998), and a carpet whose
gentle berms recall ripples of loose skin or
the topographic pattern of rodent burrows
(Ripple, 1998); a chorus of gaping-mouthed
hydrocal (synthetic clay) vessels (Gaggle,
1998); and white carpet fiber tufted to form a
glistening foamy spiral in reflected tints of
green and blue (Whorl, 1999).
For De Tempore, Donovan has built a
new, larger version of her 1999 piece Moiré,
which uses a phenomenal quantity of adding
machine paper, unrolled and then re-rolled
into a number of large, floppy rounds. Laid
over or against one another and covering
the majority of the floor space in Grand Arts’
large gallery, they form a rippled sea of
flaccid organic slices, creating both a visual
and a physical field that is activated by the
movement of the visitor within the space.
The energy of these aggregated forms
appears to be only coincidentally contained
by the four walls of the gallery; in another
location they might morph — shrinking or
expanding — to accommodate the available
space. At first glance monochromatic, the
expanse of white is gradually revealed by
our eyes to contain other shades, namely
subtle hues of purple, yellow, and gray. The
odd beauty and rich allusions of these
languorous forms transcend any reference
to their quotidian source. Time and ingenuity
are partners in Donovan’s patient transformational
methods of creation. Characterized
by a perversity of quantity, the all encompassing,
absorbing intensity of her work
evokes a powerful synesthetic reaction;
one’s senses are tugged to the surface,
charged, and placed on high alert. The
experience is riveting.
In their painstaking process, Jyung Mee
Park’s installation sculptures, like
Donovan’s, pay homage to the abstract
notion of labor — its endless, sacrificial, and
even sacramental nature. Their content
alludes to the regenerative nature of life,
with the appearance of round shapes and
charred surfaces. Five years ago, when a
prolonged illness rendered Park too weak to
continue her artmaking as before, she
began experimenting with folding the sheets
of rice paper that she had previously thought
of as merely a support for her drawings and
paintings. The strength yet delicacy and
beauty of the paper forms took on metaphorical
implications for the artist as she
convalesced and began to create sculpture
through the accumulation of these simple
diagonally folded sheets. Numerous
variations resulted, from gentle peaks or
volcanic forms with vertiginous central
craters to gargantuan cones or a triangular
mound of stalagmites. According to Park,
these came into being intuitively, as if the
physical nature of the folded paper itself was
directing the formation of the sculpture.
Remarkably, the natural affinity between the
stacked individual units made having to
actually adhere one element to another
unnecessary.
After concentrating on folded paper sculptures
and installations for the past four
years, Park’s work recently took a different
turn. During a residency this summer at the
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, in
Omaha, Nebraska, she began experimenting
with harnessing the power of the sun to
create markings on various wooden objects.
Working outdoors on sunny days with a
magnifying glass, she burned patterns onto
wooden disks and bowls of various sizes
and shapes (the process of burning itself a
speeding up of the much slower natural oxidation
of organic materials). Park achieves a
remarkable emotional and allusive range in
these markings — from lyrical (if not also
ironical), suggesting rain or teardrops, to
sinister, in their erratic implication of some
sort of pox. Several of these new works are
premiered in De Tempore in Grand Arts’
small gallery. In one, small concave disks
perched upon wire brackets projecting from
the wall invite comparison, their irregular
patterns suggesting the results of a
laboratory trial. In another, charred wooden
bowls with flesh-colored interiors displaying
the age rings of the parent tree randomly
dotted with burn spots are perched on burnt
and blackened tree stumps, suggesting
acid-rain-dappled toadstools. Throughout
these works, as in Park’s folded paper
pieces, process, form, and content are
united. The subtle charred odor of these
mysterious markings is a vestige of the
diligent effort that brought them into being,
just as the round surfaces upon which they
lie speak to a cyclical notion of time.
More conceptual in nature than that of
Donovan or Park, Achim Mohné’s work
frequently involves a situation of controlled
chance. A sequence of events is set in
motion, and the passage of time in combination
with natural forces — rather than the
hand of the artist — literally forges the work of
art. His works are ephemeral; they exist
primarily in documentation or memory, like
the spoken word after leaving the speaker’s
lips. Mohné’s prodigious body of work has
dealt with notions of surveillance/voyeurism
(index:/love and Nonplusultra), chance
(Cine Corpse), the experience of simultaneous
yet different notions of time (Der Hase
undderIgel and 1642 Selbstbestating-ungen), or in the case of his more recent
work, capturing and enlarging often over-looked
or not easily observable natural
phenomena .Light Column, an installation
Mohné developed during his residency this
past summer at Villa Aurora, in Pacific
Palisades, California, is a light projection
and video work employing a searchlight that
projects a 90-foot-long beam, 25 inches in
diameter, the end of which is swallowed by a
black parabolic bowl. In darkness, the only
thing visible is the projected beam of light
that appears to be suspended in space. A
video camera is set to record the dust made
visible in the projected light, and still
photographs have been created from these
images. The swirling specks, streaking lines,
web-like patterns, and dust storms docu-mented
in these photographs range in
activity from calm to fervent. Mohné’s
contribution to De Tempore is another
exploration based upon the capturing of
dust. Eins zum Anderen (in English One to
Another) involves a turntable and
unrecorded record disk that “plays” in
endless repetition over the course of the
six-week-long exhibition. Each play gradually
produces more and more static, the result
of the accumulation of dust particles (Mohné
calls them “tiny meteors”) on the record.
After about 200 plays, the sound begins to
recall the cracking and popping of a fire
burning, and the piece becomes an audible
metonym for the “passage” of time.
Stationed near the entrance, it serves as a
touchstone for this concept, one shared by
all of the works in the exhibition.
Time stands still. Time passes quickly by.
Time speeds up, slows down, moves
forward and backward. Davies’ three categories
of time are less three separate ideas
and more nuances of a single concept .
Although time may feel to be more one or
another, depending on our state of mind or
current activity, it is in fact all three. The work
of these three artists captures the complex
reality of time and allows us to contemplate
this experientially, rather than merely intellectually.
Neuroscientist and humanist Antonio
Damasio has long struggled to uncover
greater scientific evidence to support his
belief in the significant role that emotions
play in determining how humans think and
function. His latest book, The Feeling of
What Happens: Body and Emotion in the
Making of Consciousness, uses the term
“wordless knowledge” to describe all of the
sub-rational information our body absorbs
that then presents itself mentally as “the
feeling of knowing.”
Damasio’s research
makes an argument for placing this
emotional knowledge, long subjugated to
the “inferior” realm of intuition (not surprisingly, traditionally associated with the
“lesser” sex), as being at the very core of
consciousness — arguing that it is in fact
consciousness, rather than rational thought,
which separates us from less evolved
organisms.
Artists spend much of their energy mining
this realm of wordless knowledge in the act
of creation. When we experience their
artwork we are offered insight far more
nuanced than a rational or scientific treatise
alone can yield. The work featured in De
Tempore invites us to engage more deeply
in a fully sensory dialogue — not excluding
the intellect — on a subject which is so
complex yet so familiar that the knowledge
of it already permeates our spirit (mystical
time), body (Newtonian time), and mind
(relative time). In their approach to artmaking,
Donovan and Park derive inspiration
largely through a deepening rapport with a
particular material, learning more and more
about its physical properties and allowing
this knowledge to inform the development of
the work. Mohné tends to work more
conceptually and less intuitively but similarly
yields to the forces of chance and discovery
in forming his artworks. Not surprisingly, the
circle — a symbol of continuity and eternity —
appears again and again throughout all of
the work in this show. Donovan, Park, and
Mohné are restless experimenters who
produce works of profound beauty and
reflection through the transformation of
ordinary materials in synchronicity with the
flow of time — mystical, Newtonian, and relative —
as experienced by our spirit, body, and
mind.
Angela Anderson Adams
Guest Curator
Arlington, Virginia
October 2000
Angela Adams is the Director of
Community and Public Art for the Arlington
County Cultural Affairs Division, Arlington ,
Virginia.
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