This month, the Julie Chae Gallery is hosting "Travelling Without Moving," a collection of paintings by Amanda Church. The exhibition features recent works by the painter, all of which explore the ideas of place, movement and time through abstract forms. The paintings are all oil on canvas, displaying fanciful forms in soft colors.
Several paintings of various sizes are hung around the single room and the traditional white walls and lighting from above make the pastel colors of the canvases stand out. The works are very playful, with thick lines meandering through big plant-like shapes, reminiscent of Dr. Seuss illustrations.
This fits with the Julie Chae Gallery's aesthetic, which often features works with bright colors and abstract forms or patterns. The gallery focuses on emerging artists; the last exhibition, "Myths & Fables," showed works by two recent MFA graduates. In fact, Church is the most experienced artist so far to display work at Julie Chae. However, these extra years of experience do not seem to enhance her ability to create a well-rounded show.
Church derives her imagery from tropical and coastal regions she has visited, namely Puerto Rico, Florida and eastern Long Island. The soft colors and flowing forms reflect this, though the connection is not apparent without it being pointed out. The paintings also reference the "blurred edge of the horizon line, which rarely stays horizontal." It is difficult to find a visual manifestation of this idea. If Church's inspiration is not readily apparent, her larger works are at least visually pleasing.
Big, organic, cartoon-like shapes flow across the canvases, creating a sense of movement that draws the viewer in. Several paintings, like "Room 412" and "Secret Pleasures" are very large (72 inches by 80 inches), and these are the most powerful. The enormous stature of the shapes emphasizes their color, and the canvases are so large that they engulf the viewer.
This stature enhances the feeling of movement created by the twisting, biomorphic passages in the paintings. In addition, the size of the canvas forces the eye to really travel, following the flow from one shape to another. In these pieces, a sense of the dynamic relationship between forms and the idea of the passage of time that Church describes is physically expressed.
The lack of a background to root these abstract forms adds to the perception that they are floating around each other. This impression, however, is less apparent in the smaller paintings. In these, the compositions seem cramped, which fixes the shapes in their place; the feeling of movement (and therefore, time) is lost. In addition, moving closer to the pieces, the texture of the canvas becomes visible.
This ruins the sensation of the shapes as soft, almost liquid beings that smoothly change form. Instead, the illusion vanishes and the slick surface that was there before becomes rough and mundane. The medium sized canvases are neither off-putting nor engaging; they do not invite contemplation as the larger pieces do, but they are more interesting than the smaller ones.
These smaller paintings are grouped together, perhaps in an effort by the gallery to make them seem more powerful than they are. Julie Chae Gallery does a great job of placing the paintings in such a limited space, though it may not save the small canvases. The lack of a dividing wall allows visitors to see all the works at once as they enter. Large paintings are hung slightly apart from the others so that the viewer is truly surrounded by the flowing compositions. Clearly the gallery recognizes the difference in impact that coincides with the size difference of these works.
Another aspect of Church's work transcends her abstract forms. Some paintings, including "Room 412," contain numbers and letters that seem to make reference to specific times and places. In "Room 412," "7:09" and "72" are entwined in colored tendrils, tying what is otherwise abstract and non-objective to perhaps a moment in the artist's life. They evoke the experiences of travel and of memory without sacrificing the abstract beauty of the canvases.
Travelling Without MovingAt the Julie Chae Gallery, through Mar. 1450 Harris AvenueStorefront 47 in the SOWA district617-357-0001
The printed version of this article contained a misprinted caption on page 8. The caption should have read:"'Sunrise Sunset' shows Church's interest in using abstract shapes as a way to depict movement"
