T. Kelly Mason: Who are the luminaries of our time
20 June–20 September 2008, Brussels
Who are the luminaries of our time
In T. Kelly Mason’s 3rd solo exhibition at Galerie Catherine Bastide, Mason will be exhibiting several new groups of luminaires.
The first of these new works, which hang from the ceilng, incorporate drawing text and color to ask questions of themselves and their viewers through pun, self reference and the abstract call of color and form in space. The texts raise direct questions about meaning, history and action.
A second group of works which lean on the walls are lightboxes, Mason’s first lightbox works were arrived at in response to an architectural and lighting problem for a project at the Munich Opera House in the summer of 2007. These are painted using a fluid yet obsolete animation artist’s technique and color underlayment. The obsolescence of this technique and architectural concerns led Mason to begin a series of images from the catalog raisonee of the artist Dan Flavin. (The formerly ubiquitous light fixtures used in Dan Flavin’s work are rapidly being phased out of production and thus their status as “ordinary” objects is rapidly diminishing.) Mason’s interest in the problems raised by the objects and their effects is turned toward the problem of painting. These images are as much about what Walter Benjamin would say is the objects’ cult status (our desire to make an everyday occurrence into a name occurrence- “is that a Flavin, no it’s a Lamp”) as they are its opposite, a color event in real space and relation with the simple truth of real things.
The third group of luminaires are large pictures with a sculptural component, things that are images and objects simultaneously. As objects, they engage in a set of relations with other objects and the spaces in which they reside. As images they evoke spaces and the people and things in them.
In the past Mason has worked extensively in sound, light, and architectural scale installations. Much of Mason’s previous work, particularly the sound installations, bear a peculiar impossibility of reproduction. The real work, the interaction of sounds and words in and of a space is at least 4 dimensional and can never be adequately re-presented. The thing is the thing. Gaston Bachelard writes that ”To give unreality to an image attached to a strong reality is in the spirit of poetry.” Mason is interested in the physicality of this thing that holds itself between the future and the past and has it’s place in the listening as much as in the telling. The thing is NOW.
IF A COLOR CAN NAME A PERSON
CAN MR BLUE TELL US ABOUT THE LIGHT
OF HIS NIGHTIME HOURS
CAN MRS GREEN PLEASE EXPLAIN HOW THE COLOR
YELLOW AFFECTS HER AWAKE TIME
