11 Jul 2017

Material Mythos: Laura Bernstein, Ben Dowell, Heidi Lau, Sangram Majumdar, and Clintel Steed

Geary Contemporary

Reviewed by Ashley Norwood Cooper

Meaning-making and materiality are intertwined.

Sangram Majumdar paints the tension between substance and depiction. Surfaces hold and then give way to illusion, positive and negative spaces reverse, imagery appears and then fades into abstraction. Leaving much unresolved, he draws the us into the process of painting. The viewer becomes a co-creator.

In Daoist mythology, the goddess Nuwa created humans out of mud. She also cut the legs off of a turtle to form the Pillars of the Earth. Heidi Lau has fashioned her own Pillars of the Earth out of clay. Textured and craggy, her turtle legs are covered with eyes. Instead of a male creator-god and a male artist as sub-creator, we see the art of a female artist following in the shadow of the creator-goddess.

For the artists in "Material Mythos," materials are powerfully generative, both directing and expanding the ways they understand the world and their roles as makers.