Inseparability

FIVEten Studio Presents Inseparability

Sept. 1 through Oct. 1 2008
Reception Friday Sept. 5, 2008
6-9pm

Featuring artists:

Christine Kesler
Jordan Felling
William Downs
Justin Limoges
Nick Meyer
Zoe Blackwell
Dina Danish
Brooke Ann Inman

The work of Christine Kesler speaks about themes of expansion and contraction, looking and the desire for perfect forms. Sometimes entire suites of drawings explore the dynamics and relationships of a single form or a small family of forms. Her abstractions are sourced from the body and the landscape, often distilling vast spaces or structures down to a much more spare and concise interpretation on panel or paper. There is an economy of visual language and a definitive casualness in her markmaking, as well as the examination of balance, tension, and integrity of material. The forms that recur in all of her work are evidence of the constant negotiations with the phenomenology of being human. She is interested in all of the ways that things (such as abstract forms) can exist together in vast difference but still somehow on the same spectrum as everything surrounding them, inseparable opposites. The work of Pablo Neruda and Forrest Hamer are influential for meditations on economy of language, relative duality and soulfulness.

"In selecting work for this show, one of the interpretations of Inseparability that was most compelling is in works dealing with the continuous emergence of the ordinary. One’s daily routine is inseparable from and constantly converges with an art practice that aims towards something more powerful and transcendent. Running parallel, there is also a theme of inseparability of one’s interior and exterior bodies... with the physical self as a subject, these artists are questioning how we are physically contained and ultimately held separately from one another, in constant negotiations with other physical bodies." - Christine Kesler



Jordan Felling addresses materiality and femininity with works that directly evoke a pregnancy of form. These richly layered abstractions of the human body suggest unto themselves fertility and a quiet space containing the female body, layered with light and shadow. There is also a quiet mental space created in the elegance of these platinum prints.



William Downs’ multi-headed erotically charged forms inhabit a space that seems to exist somewhere on a blurry line between fantasy and reality. These lush drawings deal with imagery culled from conscious and unconscious desires, two inseparable forces that equally drive the work.

Justin Limoges’ line drawing takes on the idea of inseparability of spirit and body through its depiction of a ripped-open torso. Presenting a graphic departure from Caravaggio’s painting of the wounded body in Doubting of Thomas, his work is brimming with the anxiety of war, doubt and spiritual reckoning.


Nick Meyer’s photographs and Brooke Inman’s drawings all have a distinctly experiential frame of reference that threads through their entire body of work, as they record moments in their everyday life and days spent with friends and lovers. These seemingly benign or carefree moments turn into the impetus for making their work, and add up to a greater whole that addresses the inseparability of one’s non-art practices with one’s art-making endeavor. Meyer’s photographs are inhabited by a child-like wonder, with adult kids climbing trees and diving into lakes. It feels like summer in each of his photographs in this exhibition, and the adult kids are playing more towards the kid end of the spectrum until school starts again.


Inman’s drawings and installations are filled with an obsessive mindfulness of the details that make up one’s routine: the banal (the clothes worn on a weekend) to the extraordinary (the wistfulness of falling in love). Inman’s drawings are as well filled w/ a child-like personal narrative- the sensations she describes are hopeful and she captures a sense of gratefulness and reverence in witnessing her own life happening around her.



The narrative that emerges from Zoe Blackwell’s delicately marked-up picture plane often has to do with trust and a highly personal belief system. Her texts are sparse, optimistic and incredibly poetic, and give a sense of the artist’s spelling-out of her own ideology.





Dina Danish’s relationship with the world around her is portrayed in constant tension with language barriers and various cultural uncertainties. She uses repetitive texts and her own parameters and recording systems to create works of art that seem to exist in distinct harmony with a disjointed and perhaps entirely unpredictable lifestyle, one that reflects a dissolving of boundaries between art and life.