CAVIN-MORRIS GALLERY

Restless II: Mix

MAY 16 - JUNE 29, 2013

We love the concept of a restless eye--of things seen on more than just a visual level, of a direct connection by the viewer with the artists’ heart and mind.  Last year the exhibition Restless I! was about artists new to Cavin-Morris Gallery. It traced the subtle rhythm of a pulse we felt in the field, recognition of synapses between modes of processes. It was streaming subliminally in the kind of art we were looking at, where the actual act of making was the most important part of the process for the artist--not the materials but the frame of mind the artist was working in. We had noticed artists also who had not been seen in this country but were working in the full maturity of their visions. Among them were Christophe Nancey, Sylvain Corentin, Guillaume Couffignal, Sylvain and Ghyslaine Staëlens and Pascal Oudet from France; Solange Knopf from Belgium; Isao M'onma and Kentaro Kawabata from Japan; Kriangkrai Kongkhanun from Thailand, and quite a few others.

Restless II continues this mood but this time the gaze is ours. We saw immediately how this new dynamic fits in with gallery artists like Kevin Sampson, Keith Goodhart, and Timothy Wehrle, for example, and how the work of all the artists communicates with the godfathers in this exhibition, Charles Dellschau and Emery Blagdon. This version of Restless further documents our peripatetic journey through this concept of the means being as important if not more important than the end. Of course, quality is a given so in a fully realized vision we are not privileging the means over the aesthetic, but we have noticed that in the art WE like from the Old Masters to the present, from drawings and paintings to sculpture to ceramics and wood there is an intense focus on that intensity of process. We look for the artists who are less in a dialog with the art world than with the idiosyncratic workings of their own iconoclasms. 

Restless II is a gift from our artists. It is big and chaotic and loose. It is what we carry in our heads when we think of world art. It is delicious chaos and can never be the same show twice. 

Also showing in Restless II are:  Jappie King Black, Chrissy Callas, Peter Callas, Simcha Even-Chen, Melanie Ferguson, Lauren Gallaspy, Mort Golub, Kenji Gomi, Suzy Goodelman, Lissa Hunter, Judith Katz, Bea Kwan Lim, Stephen Marder, Shozo Michikawa, Rafa Perez, Lubos Plny, Tim Rowan, Christine Sefolosha, Jeff Shapiro, Phyllis Sullivan, Akiko Tanaka, Shinya Tanoue and Kukuli Velarde, and others.