Christine Corday: Protoist Series, Selected Forms

About

Christine Corday:  Protoist Series, Selected Forms is the artist’s first solo presentation at an American museum and the culmination of her work replacing the paintbrush with the heat of a plasma torch. Corday coined the term "protoist" to describe forms in and out of a solid state, and a series of works in which she aims to suspend the moment between sensory perception and  definition.

Corday draws on her diverse studies in astronomy, cultural anthropology, chemistry, and the science of sensory perception, and her sculptures possess an archeo-astrological quality, as if they were left behind and unearthed.  The two artworks on view in the exhibition, UNE and KNOUN, exist as recording devices; every handprint that touches them will appear over time as rust, mapping an intimately individual yet shared public surface.

As a painter, Corday created her own tar-like paint mulled from raw pigment and synthetic polymers, applying it with large hand-made tools and brushes. Her early works featured abstract forms and a stark palette. Later, after living and working in Japan and Spain, Corday's work evolved, as her large forms began to reveal further dimension.  With experience gained from an astrophysics internship at NASA Ames Research Center, she intensified her mark-making through heat, utilizing a 35,000˚ F plasma torch. Corday’s approach, manipulating matter in and out of different states, produces resulting forms that catch and collect the presence of the viewer's hands and perception, bringing collected memories to the surface.