Like a Fog Holds the Light - Conner Calhoun - Lump Gallery

Jotted gallery notes (in bold) expanded upon herewith.

Tweaking my world. My nervous system registered immediate impact upon entering Lump Gallery in Raleigh, North Carolina, United States of America, Planet Earth, to see to see Conner Calhoun's exhibition Like a Fog Holds the Light. (Reference is made here to specificity of place, emplacement, displacement, transitional contexts experienced in transit and in transition from one site/state/mode to another as salient harbinger of the show's thematic tendencies.) It was a Saturday. My friend Laura drove us. Upon entry into the gallery space I was tweaked, energized, agitated, drawn in. Yet there was nothing loud about the work. The registered impact was of its own order (not hitting but nevertheless expansively projecting). This would be work that exacted specific requirements in its encounter: somatic awareness, cognitive capacity and clairvoyant potentialities on high alert. First impression - nothing obvious, literal or telegraphed. Rather, the work appeared to be oblique, metaphoric and encoded-verging-on-subliminal. The main gallery space was filled with large, largely dark paintings and a few mysterious sculptural constructs on pedestals. Object No. 1 (Ablaze) was a small bisque ceramic house filled with Slim Jim meat sticks (within a vitrine might I add. What is implied by the purported offering of a meat snack denied to the desirous snacker by a plexi barrier? What are the meat implications? The oral implications? The survival implications? The road trip implications? The gendered, body implications ["Jim"? "Slim"?]? And consider the fire implications, both literal and symbolic, implied by the work's title Ablaze.). Object No. 2 (Flower) was a spray can with an oddball sculptural flower attached to and emerging out of the spray nozzle (this trope of insertion, interconnection, diagrammatic interrelations among ostensibly separate elements would be a thematic aspect iterated throughout the show).

[My perception of the] Outlets & infrastructure of the space - altered. As I began to absorb Calhoun's paintings, they began to absorb me. The Chest in Movement (oil on canvas) is a windswept surrealist scenario in which a cartoonish figure of a person wrought in cold gray tones with yellow ovals for eyes stands before a rounded wood table on which is a large open book and a vase with stylized blackish flowers blown by a harsh wind that sweeps through the composition - the windblown flowers cut across the center of the canvas and extend both in front of and behind the person, whose monotone gray hair and beard flow in the same direction (right to left). The vase is superflat, 2D, while simultaneously signaling dimensionality, shaded right to left from muddy yellow to greenish-yellow to black, which both sets it apart from the rest of the pictorial elements - almost as if it has been grafted onto the scene - and anchors the composition. The person's hand slides under the book but inexplicably / miraculously / mystically also casts a long light gray shadow upon its pages, which are open to reveal the Roman numeral "LXXIV" ("74" [the year of someone's birth?]) and the titular phrase "The Chest in Movement" on one side and mysterious diagrammatic illustrations on the other. And what of "a chest in movement"? The phrase holds the potential for both the erotic and the quotidian (throes of ecstasy or simply a body moving through space). But unlike some artwork titles, there is no punning here, no "ah-ha" moment. Calhoun chooses to sustain the mystery rather than offer overt clues. The imaginary landscape behind the painting's protagonist is snowy and white and extends back toward a range of blue and white snow-covered mountains under a flaming yellow-into-orange sunset. The experience of viewing this and many of Calhoun's other paintings is that of encountering a portal to another dimension. I had the sense of beholding, and at times being transported directly into, an alternate mode of being [which left me simultaneously still being myself while also inhabiting aka holding a wholly other mode of reality]. Thus, as I moved through the gallery space, everything became activated and merged into the world perpetuated by the work. I thus experienced something akin to shock in encountering electrical cords, exposed corners, outlets (the actual gallery infrastructure) - all of which had become imbued with encrypted meanings.

Heart rate up not due to overt erotics [which were there] but to overall sense of intention. My somatic response to this show was providing an onslaught of information. Overwhelmed as I was by the impact of the main gallery space [which included aforementioned erotics (a painting titled Took it too far features a face down person with splayed legs and a fantasized black anus-as-crevasse cracking open as if at the epicenter of an earthquake with a mystical thread opening out into a trumpet-like figuration out of which emits something like an unscrolling musical score)], I transitioned into the adjacent gallery space just to get my bearings. There was more work by Calhoun, of a similar world-bending order. It was at this point that I made a mental note and jotted down that my heart was indeed pounding. There were a few casually placed objects on the floor. These included bisque ceramic vessel forms (Imposters and is that a bong?) and three materially compelling ceramic "cans" spray painted a believable metallic silver. They were a bit outsized and kind of wonky, as if they'd been kicked or a bit crushed - and they conveyed a peculiar banality but nevertheless sustained an aura of mystery and gravitas. I am not entirely sure why or how that sense was achieved given the Oldenburg-like goofiness of the presence of the fat, lolling cans. But I feel as though my sense of the cosmic crashing into the quotidian was not merely idiosyncratic as the title of that work, Star Cluster, suggests a similar understanding by the artist.

Parallel/Alternate Universe. Spliced Realities. It was the painting titled i have felt this before / erofeb siht tlef evah i (a title that cleverly "mirrors" the idea of perceptual inversion and/or deja vu) that triggered these notes. The composition of i have felt this... is roughly divided into one third of the left and two thirds of the right side of this large painting. The color palette of the work is conscribed to blacks, grays, whites and various degrees of saturation of (what reads as) phthalo blue. The pictorial plane is bisected by the black line of a wall's edge in a dark room in which a person holds up a lantern toward the wall, with an expanding vector of light illuminating a circle on the wall. On the other side of the wall in a blue room is an entirely distorted figure facing the wall, instead of a lantern, light emanates out of the figure's gaping maw and meets the light on the other side of the wall. Both scenarios include a ladder, a long hanging light fixture and a bench with a paint can, parallel imagery but not precisely mirrored in terms of placement. Another utterly cryptic aspect is how each figure extends a leg in a manner beyond anything humanly possible, as if the limbs were elastic material projected from the body and twisted such that the sole of each foot with bent supporting toes faces the viewer. We can infer the idea of an artist within their studio. The idea of facing a wall. Of shining light. But from there we are cut loose with our own sensations and understandings. The "parallel universe" and "spliced realities" suggested by my original jotted notes are mirrored by the impossibility of ever fully entering or knowing the hermetic meanings, the world apart, of this work.

Mug paintings x 2. [This note addressed the image of a ceramic mug, which was the focal subject of two outlier paintings in the show ("outlier" due to their relative lack of complexity) - simple object studies. It should be noted, however, that the presence of mugs can be found throughout many of the works in the exhibition, functioning as a form of punctuation, pointing to something domestic or habitual or basic within otherwise other-worldly contexts. The recapitulation of the mug imagery also had the uncanny effect of suggesting a roaming presence within and among the paintings.]

Vectors (matte/shine). I came to think about the works in the show in terms of vectors of meaning. I also noticed subtle painterly differentiations of areas of matte and shine finishes.

Philip Guston / Giorgio Morandi / David Salle / Peter Saul / Henri Matisse These are some of the painters whose work came to mind as I considered Calhoun's painting style. These names should not be construed by the reader as containing or limiting what Calhoun is doing in this work. They are simply top-of-mind jottings relative to momentary spatial perceptual observations that emerged in the encounter with it.

Doin some a that WWAAVVYY script for my boy @connercalhoun for his show at Lump. Opens this Friday. You need to see it. #wavy #waves #wavestoliveby #mourningdew #lump #lumpgallery #script #windowdrawing #opening #artopening #myboy