dayoutlast: Michael Henry Hayden and Julian Rogers @ ACME

Michael Henry Hayden

Untitled (Palm Frond #2), 2014

acrylic on aqua-resin and wood

25 x 25 inches

Michael Henry Hayden

Untitled (Palm Frond #1), 2014

arcrylic on aqua-resin and wood

9 x 9 inches

Michael Henry Hayden

Untitled (Palm Trunk), 2014

acrylic on aqua-resin and wood

40 x32

Julian Rogers

Double Positive, 2014

oil on canvas

68 x 54 inches

This grouping of images by two different artists exhibiting within the same show demonstrates just how critical lighting is to the viewing.

With Hayden's wall objects, shadow reveals dimension and therefore depth and color (dependent on viewing angle, and lighting condition (day or electrical), certainly not fixed. In the latter, the same could be said for Roger's paintings, especially in terms of how everything works flatly on the surface, certainly more as illusion, at least how I was looking at them.

Roger's work reminded me of a grouping of dark paintings by Bill Jensen shown at ACME in the fall of 2007 (see related images following this text below). Jensen's paintings were benefiting from the same placement within the space where the natural light is filtered through frosted glass at the north end. So, there is no direct light into the space but rather an even diffusion. As such (with the lights off, and the gallery owner was eager to show the differences as well), Roger's paintings revealed so much of the subtlety like Jensen's though the former's registered the occasional concrete image whereas the latter's reveled in their obscurity in abstraction, save perhaps the titling.

While not to be so divisional, dialectically or comparatively, it's the continual shifts between works that is more to my interests, the subtle modulations within individual paintings, also between artists works in the show (two and three dimensions), and between artists work present and recent past (the time factor).

In whatever relationship one wants to consider these thoughts and these works, the condition for viewing is critical here. For me, this is probably the most important single fact because it reveals just how important the site of reception is. The work in this show privileges the presentness of a viewer in the actual space as opposed to the mediation here as weblog, for example, itself a virtual view.

Bill Jensen from 2007: