Caroline Kent 'Writing' Visually at Hawthorn Contemporary

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Photo courtesy of the gallery

Caroline Kent's “Writing Forms” exhibition runs now through April 18 at Hawthorne Contemporary.

Caroline Kent’s large rectilinear wall painting completed in tonal orange struck me quickly as one of those rare colors that has few immediate associations. I might have disregarded my stray observation if other ambiguities hadn’t subsequently presented themselves. The painting itself mimics a large work on canvas for a moment before being recognized as a carefully taped off shape with slightly skewed angles and a conspicuously removed notch on the lower left. Two sculptural quotation marks slyly bracket the entire painting, and when they’re noticed, the whole piece—indeed the show itself, aptly titled “Writing Forms”—moves unmistakably from the realm of visual forms to that of language.

As a child, I aspired to possess Crayola crayon sets with the greatest number of colors. I wanted 64 with a sharpener but was forced to make do with 16. I dreamed of the unicorns that lived in boxes of 128, thinking there were colors from other dimensions. I became a grown-up the day I realized that every new color was simply a shade or tint of those in my paltry sets of 16. Still, the names given to those colors, those interstitial hues in-between the others—cornsilk, carnation, thistle—carved out new sensory pathways in my mind, nearly equivalent to those unseen wavelengths of light might have. This is of course is a testament to the power of language rather than color theory.

This meditation gripped me as I took in Kent’s abstract painterly quotation and confirmed how cleverly she smuggled my own associations with color over the border into the dimension of language. Withholding symbolic handles—fire-engine red, or banana yellow, or sky blue—or any tangible content, she managed to make that pictorial quotation about universal color and form; a quote about abstraction and not of it, even while it looked like it.

On the wall opposite the large wall piece, four smaller abstract paintings in dull flesh tones on black backgrounds complicate the ongoing semiotic inquiry. As she did with color, Kent addresses concrete subject matter with a similarly willful desire to force ambiguity. The black forms in these paintings feel caught in-between crude figuration and formal abstraction, living in an altered version of a colorless color. Each painting is framed by a theatrical hood that encourages a representational and performative read. But all these quasi-corporeal forms live in a figure/ground holding pattern as signifiers of content rather than representations of it.

A tapered painted plinth at the back of the gallery eludes easy identification. Eight feet high, drab orange again, with a pink cutout grate at the top, it insists on being identified as a nameable symbol that never quite arrives. Lingering in textual mode after the earlier parentheses, I struggled and failed to eventually place the sculpture’s symbolic derivation. I left the show a little puzzled, still wondering if the sculpture was meant to be read or simply seen. After a day or two of stewing, I concluded that the answer was probably “both.”

That particular sculptural element, like the other work in the greater installation, represent forced collisions between languages: of art and writing, of abstraction and text. Seeing any language in its most orthodox function, we tend to normalize it, forgetting its biases and modalities. Kent urges us to stay awake and resist the sensational possibilities of her media. Marshall McLuhan said, more than five decades ago, that “the medium is the message,” and his statement is as true as ever at Hawthorn Contemporary through April 18.

Opening This Week

“Experiments in Mark Making: Drawing the Natural World with Todd Mrozinski”
Saturday, March 14, 10 a.m.-1 p.m.
Lynden Sculpture Garden
Brown Deer Road

Students will experiment in the studio with a variety of media, such as graphite, vine and compressed charcoal, Conté crayons and ink as they draw natural objects gathered from the sculpture garden’s lovely, scenic grounds. Then, students will set up their own gathered still life and focus on light, composition and proportion. This event-class has a non-member fee of $42 ($38 for Lynden members), and advance registration is required; all materials will be included. For more information and to register, call 414-446-8794 or visit lyndensculpturegarden.org.

“Art From the Heart”
March 13-14
Cultural Arts Center, St. John’s on the Lake
1840 N. Prospect Ave.

Artists, collectors and art patrons Tony and Patricia Busalacchi invite the public to attend “Art from the Heart,” a showing of more than 200 original artworks created by Tony Busalacchi and others that will be made available to the public in exchange for a donation to Capuchin Community Services. The Capuchins attend to the basic needs of people experiencing homelessness, poverty and hunger through their two sites—St. Ben’s Community Meal and the House of Peace. “We have traveled the world, collecting art from China, Iran, India, Serbia, Egypt, South America, Russia, Poland… We believe that art lasts a lifetime. When one is ready, pass it along to someone else who will appreciate it. I am ready to ‘pass along’ 200 works of art; some of them are my creations, and some are from our private collection,” Tony Busalacchi says. For more information, visit capuchincommunityservices.org/artworks.

“The Happy Happy Killjoy Show” / “Out of the Cellar: Selections from the Flat Files”
March 14, 6-9 p.m.
Real Tinsel and Var Gallery

There will be simultaneous openings at two South Side venues, Real Tinsel (1013 W. Historic Mitchell St.) and Var Gallery (643 S. Second St.) “Happy Killjoy” shines a light on the absurdity of today’s pop culture and children’s toys. “Flat Files” displays some of the work Real Tinsel has amassed in its registry of work on paper from artists throughout the state. Both are up through April 18.

“The Embodied Response: The Feeling of Viewing Form”
Tuesday, March 17, 2-3 p.m.
Haggerty Museum of Art
1234 W. Tory Hill St.

Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum offers a lecture by Dr. Christopher M. Belkofer, director of Mount Mary University’s Graduate Art Therapy Program. During this talk, Belkofer will revisit philosopher Susanne Langer’s seminal work, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (1953), through the lens of contemporary relational aesthetics, neuroscience and art therapy theories. His lecture will explore how art promotes interoceptive knowing, seeking to answer questions such as, what are the phenomenon and therapeutic potentials of how pieces of art evoke sensations, thoughts and feelings in the mind and the body? The lecture is free and open to the public.