Modern West is thrilled to announce Time Code, a six-person online exclusive show featuring works by Angela Ellsworth, Kiki Gaffney, Emily Hawkins, Jim Jacobs, Kheng Lim and Paul Reynolds. This online exclusive exhibition will be on display from July 1, 2023 through September 30, 2023.
Time Code showcases a select group of artworks that explore the broad themes of human existence and bodily experience and phenomena. Through their various mediums, styles, and open interpretations, the artists in Time Code present artworks that communicate their ideas around time and memory, resulting in a group of exciting and lively relics documenting and preserving our shared life experiences.
Injecting vibrancy, geometry, and exploration of materials into the tradition of landscape painting, Kiki Gaffney reinterprets this long-standing movement to colorfully portray the imagery of her everyday life and environments. Gaffney–who’s works intricately depict scenes of the natural environment–utilizes traditional mediums like graphite and acrylics, alongside glitter, fluorescence, and photo transfers to convey the systems she sees and connections she feels in nature.
Kheng Lim is a Chinese artist from Malaysia, now based in Utah. Lim is fascinated with archetypal themes of order and chaos, death and the struggle against it, the sublime, and how traditional and ancient cultures around the world have used abstraction and geometry to portray those themes and concepts.
Emily Hawkins works with the cyanotype process–treating a surface with iron salts that react to UV light–to create multi-layered imagery of her household toys (nerf gun bullets, blocks, paper airplanes) and children’s clothing that result in fossil-like records of play and family life. Intended to question the expectations placed on mothers as family historians and on family life, Hawkin’s work distinguishes the impulse to keep records of what happens in daily family life from the more authentic but perhaps impossible desire to preserve the emotional experience of it.
Paul Reynolds creates performative, body-oriented line paintings. Juxtaposed against the subtle color gradients of his painting's backgrounds, Reynolds utilizes a large graphite pencil to illustrate and signal his acts of motion. This can include running and hitting the painting with a pencil as he passes by, standing on his head and striking the canvas, or being blindfolded to employ intuitive mark making to complete his final trace.
Angela Ellsworth is a multidisciplinary artist who utilizes drawing, sculpture, installation, video and performance. Her work has taken in wide-ranging subjects such as illness, physical fitness, endurance, religious tradition and social ritual. She is interested in the collision of public and private experiences within unexpected spaces.
Jim Jacobs is intrigued by how humans see themselves as both part of, and separate from, the natural world. His sculptures define the physicality and relationship of wood to our bodies which lend themselves as metaphors for us as humans, our social and political idiosyncrasies, and, in particular, our role in nature.
