Must Reads

Empathinc Gallery closes its doors with one last show: Osiris Rain's "Sanctuary", the culmination of
one years work beginning in the summer of 2005. A reflection on the intimacies of being human, "Sanctuary" blends archetypes, allegory and storytelling into an array of fifteen breathtaking works. www.osirisrain.com.

Also on display will be new studies by Empathinc. director, Tom Schulz.

Tom Schulz – Letter From The Director -- 8/10/06

“It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards, the Queen remarked.”
– Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 1871

Sanctuary and Allegory in A Post-Newtonian Reality

Living within a world of linearity and single dimensional logic is akin to wearing blinders. We look ahead, working from a limited experiential field, and (looking back), close down our visual connection to both the present and the future. This designation of disconnect then becomes a horizon event – a threshold of sorts between the was (seen here as process) and the then (seen as responsibility). This is a demarcation where everything can escape the pull of gravity.

Looking upon the paintings and drawings of Osiris Rain, I am made hyper-aware of what our past and our future share in abundance. Which is, in so many respects, Wishful Thinking. By this I mean that the significance of historical metaphor and symbolism linked intrinsically to some perceived ‘past’ would hopefully transition into a meaningful future of referential, cultural, pentimento. A future contextualized strictly by it’s own foundation. This is a construction framed in phrases:

“This is the way it has always been.”

“This is how it is done.”

“This is the way it will be.”

There is an alkaline rime that crystallizes upon rock and brick. White, pervasive, and scaly. A gossamer and microscopic canyon that is termed, efflorescence. Efflorescence may also be defined as a process, or time of development and unfolding. Empathinc. CEO, Carrie Schulz has developed an extrusion of this definition as meaning vaginal thinking: a strategy of analysis and dialogue that allows for a folding back upon. Perhaps, for want of a better term, we may conceptualize this ontological methodology as the feminine thought. More about gathering and kneading than hunting and plowing.

Expressions of time are perhaps more attuned to this femininized unfolding than they are towards the more typical pull, aim, release, bulls-eye that is the masculine imperative. In fact, one of the origins of the word sin (hamartia) means, “missing the mark”. Missing the mark intimates an opportunity to try. Again. Missing the mark becomes part and parcel of the process of creation. The efflorescence that creeps across the surface now forward and then back like some scrim, bound scripted along both wall and page.

In The Discovery of Heaven, Dutch author Harry Mulisch has a character ponder if it “was …always like this? Did the real work lie in the preparations and was the actual achievement nothing more than a bonus?” This is the edifying reef of efflorescence. The undulation of circular time. The multi-layered tidal pull that is allegory. As such, I find myself more fascinated in the analysis of how Rain misses the mark in his paintings. What young artist should be hitting the mark? How may understanding supercede myth?

Roman playwright Seneca would have us believe that “that which achieves its effect by accident is not art.” Any self-described ‘kitsch painter’ might argue that it is the very mastery of any medium (here read painting) that makes work or expression ART. I might reply, in the most unfolding of sentiments, that mastery might well be configured deep within the notion of mastery as release. Release of comparatives. Release of linear time continuity. Release from all of that gravity.

Is there sanctuary depicted in this one-year body of work? Well yes, especially if the idea of sanctuary is defined as a safety that is bound within the confines of that which is familiar. That which is known, even as there is already painted mystery, romance, yearning. I might offer that the most accurate depiction of sanctuary could be near unto that point of leaving the horizon that is the unknown. Sailing time after time across the creased edge of a one dimensional, flat world. Letting fly the allegorical depiction of all space beyond the pastoral setting of the fatigued Newton and his apple tree.

In Rain’s work (especially as he misses the mark), Newton’s apple would not necessarily initially descend straight to the ground; it might meander and drift. A trout stream cut back and forth along a glacial plain. But still, as viewers – regarding not the possibilities – we would wish it so to fall, that it would have no where else to go, but down. In these hoary expectations aligns our own association with repetitive and familiar action. It has so very little to do with the disposition of the apple.

Tomschulz.,
EMPATHINC.

"The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas,
to propagate thoughts, to serve as example...The aim of art is to prepare a person
for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good."

– Andrei Tatkovsky