jack McWhorter: Crossing the Horizon
Exhibition Dates: october 1 - October 26, 2019
Reception: Thursday, October 3, 6 - 8 pm
The Painting Center is pleased to present Crossing the Horizon, an exhibition of new paintings by Jack McWhorter in the Main Gallery. McWhorter is searching within painting for a connection between something that hovers just below the world of visible matter and systems of recognition and information in our visible material world. The paintings are informed by several open impulses and ideas that radiate the spirit of natural and coded systems. For example, experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a perpetual coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. The inner life of natural phenomena becomes an alternative to the automatic perception of nature as landscape. The work is involved with the process of nature in so far as it goes through different kinds of climate and seasonal states within a world of happenings with no singular reference.
These are hybrid spaces formed between human systems of organization and analysis and natural systems of growth and failure. Maps and charts are mixed together with crystalline structures and cell formations. The paintings are developed through layering these various languages one upon the other. The record of the intersections and negotiations of each color, mark, and layer of paint sets up moments of conflict in the resulting image. McWhorter’s work brings a strong sense of touch and play into this predicament of describing a world of space and form full of change, conflict, and fleeting evidence.
His own characterization of his work as “a kind of temporal architecture, tracking the course of the paintings own making, searching for coordinates to locate a possible meaning with the imagery”, places McWhorter in the same sphere with other artists who look to further painting’s metaphorical relationship to the world through plying their craft at the boundary between the representational and abstract, and subjective language and notational systems.
Jack McWhorter lives and works in Akron, OH. He is currently Professor of Art, School of Art, Kent State University at Stark. The artist has participated in exhibitions at Sint Luca School of Art & Design, Brussels, Belgium, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang, China, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Painting Center, New York, NY, Jeffrey Leader Gallery, New York, NY, WAH Center, Brooklyn, NY, University of Arizona, Tempe, AZ, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI., among others. For more information, visit, http://jackmcwhorter.com.
