Greg Colson | Rose-Lynn Fisher | James Griffith

3 shows for PST ART: Art & Science Collide

Opening Reception: September 7th from 5-7pm

Greg Colson: Heliocentrism (Not to Scale)

Greg Colson, an LA conceptual artist working in assemblage, painting and sculpture, is recognized for exploring physical and intellectual systems, natural and man-made patterns shaped by efficiency or design, societal structures and other measurable data that he distills and illustrates via pie charts, graphs and models constructed of ordinary mundane materials. For example, a template depicting the fluid system gasket of an automobile engine that he painted on a found piece of rough-hewn plywood jarringly disrupts this precisely rendered system through odd materials and re-contextualizations.  His pie-charts illustrating specific collected data such as “Leading British Phobias” draws out the poetry and humor in our social patterns, suggesting there are limits to - and hazards in - our obsession with efficiency, data and analysis of every kind. His new exhibition, Heliocentric Models, will consist of abstracted “Solar System” wall reliefs in which the Sun and orbiting planets are depicted with found balls (such as soccer, baseball, golf, and billiard balls.) Conflicting notions of movement and gravity come into play; the illusion of planetary motion runs counter to an awareness of the balls having been thrown, kicked and hit in their “previous lives.” Scientific facts are conceptually and playfully reimagined.

Greg Colson, Solar System, 2002, acrylic and graphite on wood panel with balls, buttons, and shelves.

James Griffith: Small Paintings of Infinity

James Griffith’s paintings of animals and celestial bodies are painted with tar from the La Brea Tar Pits, essentially a fossil product of geologic time. The work conceptually comes full circle by implying that these animals, painted in tar, are threatened by a world dominated by the use of petrochemicals. His process allows this primordial goo to puddle and pool organically on his painting surfaces, “producing unexpected textural events, and echoing the fluid processes that affect evolution.”  He renders detail into this organic flow by incising into the tar, recalling, as he says, another layer of history by referencing 19th century engravings of nature and the development of natural history studies.  In his new exhibition, Small Paintings of Infinity, Griffith presents the contrast of human scale painting with an imagined rendition of our vast expanding universe. The exhibition includes interpretations of the Sun and Moon.  As he remarks, “The burning stars, we now know, manufacture the complex chemistry of life from the simplest compounds, and the Moon controls our tidal flows.” Griffith’s work reflects Darwin’s profound vision that life on this planet is one fluid entity that has changed its forms and methods of survival countless times.

James Griffith, Origin Story | The Sun adn the Gravity of Radiance, 2020, tar and oil on panel, 36 x 84"

Rose-Lynn Fisher: Stardust: Bone & Botticelli

Rose-Lynn Fisher explores interconnections on the continuum between micro and macro in her photographs through a microscope, airplane window, and at eye-level.  In previous bodies of work, she investigated the organic structure and emotional terrain of her tears, aerial patterns on the land, and the extraordinary complexities of honeybee bodies. In her new exhibition, Stardust: Bone and Botticelli, Fisher takes a cue from Carl Sagan’s stardust concept, which NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn encapsulates as, “the iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones was literally forged inside of a star that exploded billions of years ago.” Fisher’s series of micrographs looks at variations on a theme of dust, sublime to subliminal, including scanning electron images of a fragment from her bone, revealing wonders at every magnification. In other work, at magnifications up to 30,000x she contemplates particles of detritus removed from the backside of a Botticelli under restoration. She states that they are “tiny, yet tangible vestiges of time and place, carried like a kernel of thought continuing in the winds of another era.” Fisher’s work parallels William Blake holding infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.