Christine Nguyen & Chris Oatey: Indexing Nature

20 Enero - 17 Febrero 2024

Resumen

Though inspired by opposing subject matter, Christine Nguyen’s organic plant life and Chris Oatey’s concrete and heavy machinery, works exist harmoniously in atmospheric conversation with one another, highlighting the visual similarities of loose gravel to cosmic dust.

Presented in the Main Gallery, Indexing Nature will feature large-scale works on paper that each artist created in unique conversation with both natural and manmade environmental factors.

Sunflowers harvested in late summer are the focus of Christine Nguyen’s mixed-media cyanotypes. Stemming from her Stars, Constellations, and Sunflowers series, an ongoing body of work started in 2014, works featured in Indexing Nature capture her annual process of cultivating, harvesting, and recording sunflowers via cyanotypes exposed in the evening sun.

With the use of his car, paper, and a parking lot, Chris Oatey drives over a blank sheet of paper to record the erosion and wear of local manmade environs. Once imprinted onto the sheet, back in his studio Oatey uses carbon paper to highlight the parking lot texture, the marks of his own hand recorded during the process.