On Knowing Unknowing. A Material Narrative

About

Behind this crazed,
Beloved veil,
Are vision after twilight vision
Loving you.
And staking out a clearing
In the jungle,
From an alley,
Bearing an emancipating taste
For your release alone,
Your very presence on the scene,
Repeating to you:
In the diamond,
On the corner,
We first heard
Those wild words,
From pistols
To the core,
Our body dog,
Our movie mind in avalanche,
Our peacock heart,
The double-dealer,
Frantic, no-look pass
To spirit,
Floating upwards
From slick lips
Where all life poured,
And downward
From the dark and moon,
Our miracle,
Our earth-sick sun.
Alexander Nemser

People seek out different things. Some want clarity while others yearn for ambiguity. Some plan methodically while others rely on instinct and improvisation. Some want to focus on one thing and master it, while others glean from multiple practices. The act of making allows us to make and unmake, act and react, know and un know.

In ” On Knowing Unknowing: A Material Narrative artists Nancy Azara, Yevgeny Fiks, Maia Cruz Palileo, and Sun You address the space between knowing and unknowing. There is a spectrum of what is acquired knowledge and what is intuition. 

Nancy Azara paints, carves, traces, cuts, and moves around her materials in a way that  negotiates raw instinct with thoughtful deliberation with a very specific and intricate thinking. The work embodies serious play. Surface is super rough yet delicate. There is a definite sense of knowing the materials yet the forms and imagery continue to unravel into the unknown.

Yevgeny Fiks conducts rigorous research that dictates his work. He is inspired by the collapse of the Soviet Union. His work makes us take a closer look at the accepted Soviet history and offer a lens that shows  repressed histories. Fiks also muses on weaving the Soviet and Yiddish narratives. Imagine a painting of a Soviet Era satellite flying over the oldest Synagogue in Russia. The moonlight glares off of the satellite making it read like a constellation circumambulating around the illuminated star of David.

Maia Cruz Palileo creates painting that fuses her memories with an imagined narrative. The paintings are inspired by the oral histories passed down in her family. Ghost images emerge out of the woven and layered marks. The background and forms merge while maintaining their distinction. Her black and white paintings don’t feel like the absence of color. You look at the narrative of these paintings and you feel like you know the source but just cant seem to verbalize. Memories in the mist of mysterious mirages.

Sun You makes objects by assembling various metals and connecting them with magnets. The intimate scale work commands the space around it. Other times the metal pieces are attached to pieces of painted wood, or fabric where she taps into the physicality of painting and combines it with her mode of composing found and sculpted objects. There is a spontaneity present in how these are composed, overtime the playful spontaneous gestures accumulate to a kind of instinctive knowing. The compositions offer a beautiful conversation between the fragmented and the whole.