Fellow Travelers
November 1st- December 15th
Dylan Strzynski- These bas relief sculptures are the result of a decades long attempt to synthesize a specific process that is both natural and human. The knotted, wiggly channels that meander across these pieces resemble the work of wood boring insects. But their form and technique are derived from the repairing of cracked road surfaces. These surfaces expand in summer heat and contract in winter freeze. At first, small cracks allow moisture to penetrate surfaces. The moisture freezes and expands. This drives the small cracks apart growing them into fissures that spread out across the driving surface. Eventually road crews fill the cracks by hand, applying hot tar with a large brush.
The spiderweb-like cracking of black top is a natural process induced by seasonal extremes. The application of tar is a human process that highlights and defines that natural process. The resulting marks are unusual because, although highlighting them is a deliberate act, the paths are predetermined by naturally occurring cracks. (The entire process can be further inverted when one considers that the cracking is partially caused by inconsistencies in the industrial application of a natural material processed by man.) However, it is not necessary to look beyond what results from the simple combination of natural cracks and the deliberate application of tar; strange pathways that are neither strictly deliberate nor solely natural.
At the same time, this is an opportunity to view a deep time process on a micro scale. The seasonal modulations that breakup roads are the same as those that carve canyons and erode the Sphinx. The act of mirroring these processes and transferring them into human size objects is a spiritual exercise.
Guiding a router across a piece of plywood layered with paint, glue and other post industrial accretions one is reminded of the slow forces of melting glaciers that formed our rivers and lakes 20,000 years ago. Drifting even further back, the Grand Canyon is believed to have begun forming 70 million years. At this scale one rotation of the spinning bit lasts longer than an empire.
A geological history of the American Southwest occupies a few square feet of wall in a room where plywood and power tools lead to a blissful loss of self.
Helen Gotlib- The rules of printmaking have been defined by the medium’s masters and the limitations of its tools. Helen Gotlib pushes the boundaries of printmaking in terms of scale, presentation and process, proving that there are no rules, only spaces within which to innovate. Gotlib uses a small press and raw commercial materials to render uncommonly large print based images. The creation of her work is followed through with a style of presentation that brings it out of the 1600s and into today’s white wall art spaces.
Gotlib’s unorthodox approach to a traditional medium is balanced by adhering closely to her subject. Mystified by the gradual changes in terrain and flora that occur across seasons and agricultural zones, she is inspired by interactions with nature that occur during her frequent travels and daily adventures in the Michigan woods. She patiently and unvaryingly transfers her impressions of these encounters on to the blocks and plates that add up to the contemporary print based work she produces.
