McKenzie Fine Art: Exhibition: Elastic Bandwidth 2023-24

55 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002 212 989 5467


	Elastic Bandwidth December 1, 2023 - January 21, 2024
	Elastic Bandwidth features five abstract artists who employ banded color as a significant feature in their work: Paul Corio, Takuji Hamanaka, Jenny Kemp, Audrey Stone, and Deborah Zlotsky. Paul Corio constructs his dynamic “ribbon” paintings using interlocking triangles in a variety of disciplined color sequences that progress from a light value and resolve to dark. The bands of color, both zigzagging and straight, are set against contrasting grounds and suggest movement, velocity, as well as an unstable pictorial space. While some ribbons appear to travel deep into a shimmering, perspectival depth, others appear to lie flat along the picture plane. Takuji Hamanaka’s recent works are inspired by the constant and seemingly eternal flow of waterfalls. He uses vivid color and repeated structures to suggest a similar quality of endless movement. Working with the Bokashi technique of woodblock printing, the artist prints multiple small papers in gradient color which are then carefully cut and collaged onto a larger sheet. Set against a background of softly modulated bands of black and white, intensely colored ribbons of gradient color arc and undulate to create a strong illusion of cylindrical volume or gently rippling movement. Curving bands of vibrant, solid color undulate, intertwine, and blossom outward in Jenny Kemp’s intuitively constructed paintings. Employing subtle hue gradations from band to band, they form larger, comb and wing-like structures. The structures intersect and stretch across irregular, buoyantly patterned compositions, suggesting internal rhythms and the natural forces of growth and change. Audrey Stone employs narrow bands of vibrant color in her gradient paintings. Primarily rectilinear, her arrangements can be suggestive of architectural spaces, but also the body, as straight vertical lines gently arc into tunnels or passageways of lighter or darker colors. Luminous and pulsating, the internal rhythms of the paintings can feel fast or slow, with an effect akin to a physical, vibratory experience. Deborah Zlotsky explores abstract vocabularies extracted from coded imagery and graphic material culture to examine the Jewish experience. Referencing historical systems of identification, she creates spaces of beauty and humor, using vivid stripes and bands coupled with trompe l’oeil passages to convey the complexity of concealment, generational dynamics, and diasporic movement.