Cadences, a body
of imaginative and challenging sculpture by Colin Chase that,
“grew out of my experience of bearing witness to the frenetic
pulse of our lives in the last few years.” These
site-specific visual paradigms with specialized vocabulary and
inference will open at the June Kelly Gallery, 166 Mercer
Street, on Friday, October 15. The works will remain on
view through November 16.
Chase’s work continues to
be rooted in ongoing scrutiny and pursuit of understanding the
myriad ways in which we respond to the visual. Modern and
contemporary writing systems, such as Morse, barcodes,
emoticons, text lingo and emoji excite his curiosity, said
Chase, much like, the Peruvian Nazca line drawings, cave
paintings, ancient pictographic writing systems, such as Nsibidi,
Adinkra, Cree, and Cherokee, have long captivated him.
These visual interests fuel Chase’s passionate exploration in
the development of unique systems that build on skeletal
structures of those systems.
Chase writes, this new
work distills the mercurial temperature of moods, shape-shifting
attitudes, emotions, rituals, anxieties, pain, protest,
pandemic, death, truth decay, and new myths. The
compositional matrix exploits the grid using bare-bones
abstraction, geometry, and rhythm to visually articulate the
sequence and tempo of a series of actions. The layered
systems interweave connections of structured and improvised
arrangements.
Further, these structures
created for the June Kelly Gallery space, elicit the gestalt of
square windows or portals. Several of them protrude at
various levels from the walls, (redder raga #1, 2021)
while others (#112520, 2021) subtly appear to hover in
front of the walls of the rectangular room. There is an
interplay of colors and components that call and respond to each
other in my work. This interplay extends to the neighboring
objects and the room in variable degrees. “Abstraction is
the envelope that contains the body of my discoveries.
Text, alphabet ciphers, barcodes and Morse meet at varying
intersections. Digital and analog, current world events,
cries and whispers, quotes and prayers call and respond at
various cadences as they comingle in two and three dimensions.”
Everything and every human action revolve in rhythm -
Babatunde Olatunji.
Chase lives and works in
New York City and in Ulster County and teaches art at the City
University of New York. He received a BFA from Cooper
Union and an MFA from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Chase has been represented in many one-person and group
exhibitions throughout the United States, as well as in Europe
and Brazil. His work is included in numerous private and
public collections, among them The Studio Museum in Harlem, The
New School of Social Research, Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture, Prudential Life Insurance Company and AT&T.
His public commissions include the Queens Hospital Center and
the Malcolm X Memorial in Manhattan. In 2017, Chase
received the Joan Mitchell Grant Award for Painters and
Sculptors.
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