Jack Mcwhorter: visible Universe
Exhibition Dates: november 2 - 27, 2021
Reception: Thursday, november 4, 5pM - 8pm
The Painting Center is pleased to present, Visible Universe, a group of selected paintings 2018-2021 from Jack McWhorter, inspired by the 4 inch high marble sculpture of a woman ('The Stargazer'), c. 3000 BCE, Cleveland Museum of Art, and his persistent desire to give form to a connection with the cosmos that often feels lost or hidden.…on view November 2 - 27, 2021.
This installation of paintings is evidence of McWhorter’s ongoing pursuit of what he has called “… snapshots of structures in flux or becoming, as entities simultaneously earthbound and cosmological”. The paintings are informed by several open impulses and ideas about the cosmic frontier that capitalize on meaning sensed if not seen- that gravity is a centrally attractive force and light and things move in elusive ways- a perpetual coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities with all things truly connected to everything else. That logic and evolution influence McWhorter’s rudimentary questioning of how to see and how to paint. Two lines of dialogue crawl toward each other that oscillate between visual concerns influenced by different methods of interpreting one’s own personal cosmology and how to depict a multi-faceted reality that can never be seen directly by our eyes or by our mind’s eye.
In Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, ‘The Library of Babel’, the library is defined as the universe, composed of hexagonal galleries, a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration. In a related way, the public library was the universe in McWhorter’s formative learning space. We construct our notion of the cosmos at an early age and for McWhorter it was through a relationship with books found in used book stores and libraries. Over the past decades, McWhorter has managed to collect dozens of these discarded but indelible illustrated library texts. The graphic renderings of the workings of the universe, visual symbols and images based on nature, are not all amiable. The cosmos produces explosions, bombardments, collisions, and black holes which devour stars, neutrinos that penetrate everything in their path, deathly heat, deathly cold. These volumes modeled connectivity and served as a prompt to generate his own hypothetical imagery as a parallel to the books he admires, and give form to a desire to locate embodiments of connectedness.
In the studio ecosystem, as in complex terrain, the best path to follow is not always clear at the outset. McWhorter draws from images that appear in his immediate environment, ranging from plants in the garden to the rich psychic territory of landscape spaces where the pulse of energy and electricity is felt. Subtly and deftly mixing metaphors of physical science- forces that have effects on us at a distance with the physical effects of close-up observations of tiny processes- melting ice, burning wood or vortices formed by moving air and water. McWhorter’s paintings formalize this intuition of examining ephemeral relationships as a path to propose a bigger picture. His paintings progress from connecting points made in sketchbooks where drawing activity is experientially loose and free. He is interested in drawing as a representation of many steps of gathering information that’s accumulated, exchanged, and continually elaborated. New imagery is often generated by reworking older drawings to open up fresh meaning through a cycle of organization and disintegration. Images and themes evolve and break down, to be reintegrated into another generation of paintings.
The paintings are not intended as illustrations of the cosmos but rather to radiate the spirit of it. As subjects connected with cosmology, they lend themselves easily to a degree of abstraction. In keeping with the legacy of abstraction, McWhorter uses a logic of sense to find a way through to a pictorial solution. His creative intentions are realized through the activity of painting- shape, line, and color’s inherently multidimensional quality and what they can do to imply movement, balance, pressure, and rhythm. The paintings move freely in and out of degrees of abstraction. The work shares common interest with many painters in how the properties of oil, acrylic, and mediums transform and reinvent source material. The search within painting is to explore the web of relationships between elements whose meanings arise fully from their relationships to the whole.
For more information, visit: www.jackmcwhorter.com.
