PAGOO

OPENING: November 22, 2019 from 7-9 PM

NOVEMBER 22, 2019-DECEMBER 22, 2019

Lumin Wakoa

Christofer Churchill

Essay by Jocko Weyland

Chris Churchill’s use of 1/3 cut top tab letter size folders for these paintings occasions an unexpected collision of the nonrepresentational comingling with its opposite on the most humdrum of paper storing tools. With their very specific handheld 8 ½" x 11” scale these storehouses of sensible figures, graphs, and spreadsheets become something else entirely thanks to acts of loving defacement. Leaving their timeworn routines behind, they are transformed by roiling washes of brooding undersea or outer space vistas, or conversely what can be perceived as psychic internal landscapes. The scavenger, the re-user Churchill, finding a cache of these once ubiquitous holders was drawn to their color, durability, and crisp edges, as well as the challenge to scale down in the deployment of his atmospheric and amorphous swirls and swoops, unbridled color, and curvaceous unclassifiable forms, overlaid over mysterious but conceivably concrete citations. Particularly their rich luscious purples and succulent greens whose origins can be traced to the flowers of the Topatopa Mountains and the Ojai Valley, thus fostering a tightrope act between explicitly real and intense private invention. In doing so the data that was formerly filed away in the folders is erased but also liberated, subsumed by the artist’s multi- layered and borderline hallucinatory cover-ups. As they proliferate associations of imagery jump from one to the next, and perhaps subconsciously Paul Klee comes to mind, whose deep and effective works were also never overly large. Surely a touchstone, and no coincidence he was a favorite of Walter Benjamin, whose Arcades Project is a subtle influence here, along with all the other related attempts since time immemorial to comprehensively categorize and apprehend. But despite their perennial failure such grand indexical schemes undoubtedly do speak to both ongoing historical arcs and innermost psychological states, especially in conceptual tandem with this extremely personal, almost wholly symbolic endeavor.  That tension is that between what can be documented and the inexpressible, and in referencing the Sisyphean side of total itemization they achieve an illumination of what can’t be recorded rationally, providing the viewer with singular glimpses of the unrevealed bigger picture.   

Mary Oliver’s poetry is a lodestar to Lumin Wakoa, warranting quotation in this context. In “Messenger” she writes “my work is loving the world” and elsewhere, “Every day has something in it whose name is forever.” These two touching sentiments, deceptively simple and sincerely moving, are manifested in Wakoa’s smallish, luminous evocations of bits of the world which in turn are worlds upon themselves. Wokoa’s own verse writing, and her sometime utilization of those lines as a departure point for the two dimensional, informs what one discerns in her vibrating, textured pictorial fragments recognizable either as arrangements of things we see or the things we don’t but feel. Wakoa’s assertion that  “certain poets and writers have this amazing ability to give you everything, the time of day, the weight, the light, and at the same time they give you nothing, no back story, no logic.  Reality is upended and in the process the act of experience is revealed” is surely applicable to her generous giving and strategic withholding in oil on linen. Words and their solid though everlastingly slippery meanings to some extent beget paintings bringing the minute and ineffable into a sphere of appreciation and comprehension. That is, like poetry.  These are landscapes beholden to the specificities of place, from rural Northern Florida to the residential streets of Queens, palpable locales but depending on the observer also views of intimate interiority. Aspiring to distill the moment of looking into something simple and open, such as a warm day turning cool and dust suspended in the gloaming, aiming for persistence in memory. That is accomplished in abundance, as well as demonstrations of what is utterly still but squirming under the surface. Hard-won efforts to get at the singularities of experience are eminently successful, shimmering, brightly and concurrently subtly hued, blending the physical with the incorporeal in service of the totality of a moment. One can get lost there in that infinitude or stepping back suddenly find a bouquet that could be hidden away in the background of a Vuillard painting. Changing in the light and atmosphere and shadow, time passing and daylight fading, that’s the quicksilver essence of life that Wakoa elucidates. 

Though miles apart and quite different there are similarities and this pairing resonates on many levels, especially because each artist’s imagery shares the quality of simultaneously coalescing and dispersing, forming and dematerializing. Zooming in and out, far down in the mind and far out in the cosmos, a thread unraveling on a bedspread, or a tree and grass. Conjuring up realms that telescope from infinitesimally small to untold immensity, conflating the two so the viewer can slip back and forth from one to the other in the blink of an eye. Multitudes are contained, comprehended, causing ongoing mental and ocular reverberations. Both excel at zeroing in on this or that unaccountable detail that is also invariably holistically linked to all else. Visual and metaphorical synecdoche, one for all, and all for the one. Taking the lowly mundane and giving it its due as the exalted abstract apotheosis of what we are given, calling attention to the everyday inexpressible. Oliver, appropriately, again, in “Breakage, “I go down to the edge of the sea. How everything shines in the morning light! The cusp of the whelk, the broken cupboard of the clam.” Then after further enumerations of the expansive nature of nature and existence compares it to  “…a schoolhouse of little words, thousands of words,” foretelling, “Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.”  That’s precisely what these two practitioners’ persistent assault on the boundaries between what’s falsely deemed unremarkable and the most elevated sublime give us. Unveiling, even if fleetingly, the ungraspable, showing us ways to read and see the whole story.
 

Christofer Churchill (b.1971, Long Beach, CA) is an Ojai-based artist working primarily in painting, collage, and drawing. After graduating with a B.A. at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, he went on to receive an M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. His work has been the focus of numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ; Martos Gallery, New York, NY; Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, NY; The Contemporary Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI. Most recently Christofer Churchill / Mike Kelley was presented in September 2019 at Parrasch Heijnen, Los Angeles. 
 

Lumin Wakoa lives and works in New York.  She received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.  Wakoa was a recipient of the Dedalus Foundation MFA Grant in 2010 and a Fountainhead Fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University, 2010/11. In 2018 she was a recipient of the Sharpe Walentas Foundation year-long Studio Program Fellowship. She recently She has had recent solo and two person exhibitions at Deanna Evans Projects, Present Company, and Providence College. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Spring break art fair, Taymour Grahne Gallery, and Untitled Art Fair, among other venues.