dayoutlast is a record of my direct engagement with mostly contemporary art, mostly Los Angelean.

As this blog has evolved since its 2010 inception, so has my perspective. What I once perceived as central within the investigation was what was central, literally, within the photographic frame that I shared here. While still an important consideration, such thinking has also given way to more peripheral considerations, ones also accompanied occasionally by text (written manifestation of thought) and the oscillations between them. What's missing here are larger unknowns surrounding issues of presentation and representation; the amount of time and space it actually takes to accomplish such first-hand observations; and the quandaries between documentation and interpretation.

Despite my attempt to communicate here with image and text what is essential in some respect about the artwork, neither representation should ever be considered a substitution for the primary viewing experience. Of course, occasionally there are exceptions.

Most of the time, these posts are merely remnants---residual fragments---from my last day out.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Xylor Jane @ Santa Monica Museum of Art


Gates, 2008
oil on panel
55 x 43 inches





Indigo for Sylvester, 2011
oil on panel
16 x 20 inches




3rd Order Magic Square for Harmony, 2013
oil, marker, and pencil on panel
47 x 43 inches





Like the other painting show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art right now ( Keltie Ferris ), it's really hard not to dismiss this work as mere decoration with great technical facility (in which case on all accounts, I am held at bay by either form or concept rather than passages of expression, elements within the composition that recall a human record and therefore time).  On the other hand, I also enjoyed making connections to aboriginal applications from, say, Australia, or Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie of 1943.  Then video games and lite-brites...

Unlike threads of color discussed elsewhere in this blog, Jane seems to be more fixed on the point, literally toward  more remote perceptions regarding particles more than waves.  Infinitely divisible, I liked how she reinstated Indigo for the electromagnetic spectrum.  I could ramble on with free-associations, but suffice it to say that something else did hold my attention here in a good way. Maybe it was the illusion of light.





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