From the recent exhibition Finding Space
Sept 12 - Nov 1, 2014Chicago Art Source GalleryExhibition ImagesEssay by Buzz Spector
"Space is when you find it. Thats not a typo in my first sentence. Ginny Sykes has been lots of places as artist and traveler, accumulating many whens, therefore, in times spent in New Zealand, Europe, the Caribbean, as well as the more mundane Midwest. Each locale has added to Sykess history of spatial encounters wherein she has, existentially at least, carried away with her something of those spaces. Bachelard meditates thusly on the matter: je suis lespace où je suis (I am the space where I am), by which he praises the minds incorporated spaces in which our inner lives dwell. I read sensations of place in Sykess paintings, but they are not offered here in a spirit of documentation. Rather, these bright and buoyantly aerated fields are activated by gestures freed from inscription. They offer a common pulse of sensory liquidity which, in drawing us in, reveals itself to be the transmogrification of space into visceral experience. We find . . . ourselves, after all, in such seeing."
is a reflection on my need for physical and psychological spaciousness: in life, in perspective, and spiritually. Making room for the ebb and flow as opposed to a pushing at life. This direction followed in part a prolonged illness during which I had to rethink how I could live and sustain my work. Space is a container, metaphysically and metaphorically. With spaciousness one can receive, rejuvenate, reflect, think. Without it there is panic, defense, a lack of time. Re-rooting my body and work within nature has helped me heal, and hints of nature began to show up my abstractions.
The work in Finding Space
veers toward observation, collapsing the space between my lived and perceptual experience and the abstracted performance of my responses, yet it is an essence rather than depiction of nature I am after. I use abstraction to communicate symbolic content, fusing gestural layering with texture, transparency and light. I like what Fairfield Porter once wrote about deKoonings abstractions, that they "release human significances that cannot be expressed verbally".
I too am interested in releasing paintings possibilities to create spaces that contain and are metaphors for the nature of subtlety, nuance, and mystery.
- Ginny Sykes