Retreat of the Horstman
John Burgess and Les Ramsay
Friday, May 20th — Saturday, June 25th, 2016
Opening Thursday, May 19th. 7:00 — 10:00PM
John Burgess and Les Ramsay
Friday, May 20th — Saturday, June 25th, 2016
Opening Thursday, May 19th. 7:00 — 10:00PM
RETREAT OF THE HORSTMAN
John Burgess and Les Ramsay
This exhibition takes its name in reference to the Horstman glacial landform of Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia; a geographic terrain familiar to both John Burgess and Les Ramsay. In Retreat of the Horstman, the glacier functions as a metaphor for contemplating the circulation of discourse between the works of Burgess and Ramsay. Here the glacier’s inevitable retreat motions consideration of time and passive political conduct. The agency of the glacier is taken in parallel to relations between art and political ecology, the corporate financialization of nature, and the potential for action. It is within the glaciers shifting continuum of organic accumulation and aggregation that the exhibition finds its momentum.
The formation of the glacier’s compressed water table can be described by the terms accumulation, ablation, and terminus. The organic ebb and flow of the glacier’s form is defined by the relationship between accumulation of snow—compressed and compacted by weight and time—and the ablation of the form in which precipitation melts in retreat of its extended body. The compendium of growth and rate of decay can be categorized as the glacial budget. An equation of weight, ice, and gravity motions this budget and the glacial movement that ensues. The form of currency assigned to the natural glacial process is significant in its metaphoric relation to political narratives of nature, culture, and capital. Here the glacier signals a radical potential for passive retreat in the name of political change.
The glacier itself can be considered an archive of precipitous refuge. Situated within an extended history, the core of the glacier measures time and space. The glacier is a time capsule, freezing waves of water, dissolving and replenishing in a cyclical current. The cracks and crevices produced through moments of glacial erosion signal climatic shifts. The withdrawal of the glacier body gestures metaphoric moments of contemplation and dissolve. The gesture of the glacier in both its accumulation and ablation is unhurried. Its flow and migration propose a consideration for arrested movement whilst petitioning run off, evaporation, and dispersion. This signal for erasure questions the hermetic nature of the archive, petitioning for an action of decay and
re-composition of material form.
This impetus for recombination and composition is familiar within the paintings and fabric assemblages of Ramsay. Each of his works harness a situational composite of assemblage. Within his recombinant canvases, cracks and crevasses linger as points of contact and fermentation. Ramsay is known for his aggregation of found and specially sourced fabric materials including a diverse collection of authorless cross- stitch patterns. His re-combinations cite alternative fashions and trends whilst perpetuating a timeless composition of colour and form. Ramsay actively mixes and transforms meaning within his painterly works, which feed from a vast collection of personally sourced peculiarities. Within this subjective loop of source material, repetition and connection pull together considerations of decorative politics, the space of pleasure in production, and the aesthetics of texture and form. Textiles merge in an abstraction of design and meditation of colour theory, producing intuitive responses from both artist and viewer.
Recently Ramsay has produced an abstract cross-stitch textile of his own, referencing landscape and the melt water process of glacial erosion. The labour of this gesture interfaces the intuitive meditational value of repetitive mechanical production with the personal and often abstracted autobiographical details of the final form. Ramsay’s abstracted patterns yield subjective considerations and imagination. Desert colours merge to meet a horizon of blue glacial tones and shadows. The increments of terrain energize the composition in an emergence of new form. This improvised technique is familiar to Ramsay, as his fabric assemblages and painterly compositions are often unbound from logic and unclear of direct conclusion. The intelligent interventions and autobiographic evaluations of his fabric assemblages consider visual texture as a flow of force that harnesses phantom simulations—touching and affecting the viewer’s psyche. Here the points of contact within the textile assemblage parallel that of the glacial crevasse. They represent folds of time, the enfolded and encoded creases of history’s horizon, which continually unfold around us.
This horizon of historical movement and arrested focus is considered in the geographic measuring of time, presented within Burgess’ most recent paintings. His seemingly abstract compositions reference autobiographic conclusions and political postulations beyond their formal compositional structure. These most recent paintings function as containers of extended process and strategy. They inculcate the passing of time and inevitability of change. In an endgame of anticipation, the paintings combine literal representations of measurement, including: an hourglass, burning cigarette, footprint, and an arm reaching beyond the canvas with a hand formation that gestures spatial depth. The muted colour palette places time and its accompanying anxieties into architectural-like compartments of organization. Here Burgess considers the anxious anticipation of an endgame as relative to the expiration of a person or place, the literal dissolve and decay of physical form, political autonomy, and saving grace.
Burgess’ continual focus on time, strategy, and endgame is also represented in his textural wood panel paintings that visualize arbitrary game board grids, such as those found within chess and checkers, or Sudoku and crossword puzzles. Here, room for personal subject matter creeps within the matrix of his strategic representations in the form of game pieces and formal still life compositions. Imaginary models of exchange with no end or beginning contradict the impulse to conclude or systematically define the parameters of exchange. Moments of individual contemplation are voluntarily open to interpretation. The painterly form and materiality of his muted scenes transfer the aura of an open bedroom window and the shifting light of the night sky horizon. This aura continues while being represented as in a moment of suspended overtime, pondering blended experience of interior and exterior awareness. A slip, a creep, a creak in the night—here time shares the momentum of the glacier in its occupation of past, future, and present existence.
In a surface of connections Burgess and Ramsay provide an informal expression of political rupture. Spanning historical perception by way of abstraction their works draw horizon lines that engage with imaginary realms of infinite potential. The individual works provide a dialogue, between one another, of non-linear form, connecting oscillating patterns of visible and invisible currents. These act to transform and shape the ever-shifting horizon of our world. This voluntary incoherence allows for alternative perspectives in linking Burgess and Ramsay’s practices. Their individual and singular works function autonomously whilst collaborating—personal and political undercurrent of proposition. The Retreat of the Horstman allows hindsight, and future projection, of how to be in a world at a continued moment of crisis—a continued moment of retreat.
-Jenn Jackson
John Burgess and Les Ramsay
This exhibition takes its name in reference to the Horstman glacial landform of Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia; a geographic terrain familiar to both John Burgess and Les Ramsay. In Retreat of the Horstman, the glacier functions as a metaphor for contemplating the circulation of discourse between the works of Burgess and Ramsay. Here the glacier’s inevitable retreat motions consideration of time and passive political conduct. The agency of the glacier is taken in parallel to relations between art and political ecology, the corporate financialization of nature, and the potential for action. It is within the glaciers shifting continuum of organic accumulation and aggregation that the exhibition finds its momentum.
The formation of the glacier’s compressed water table can be described by the terms accumulation, ablation, and terminus. The organic ebb and flow of the glacier’s form is defined by the relationship between accumulation of snow—compressed and compacted by weight and time—and the ablation of the form in which precipitation melts in retreat of its extended body. The compendium of growth and rate of decay can be categorized as the glacial budget. An equation of weight, ice, and gravity motions this budget and the glacial movement that ensues. The form of currency assigned to the natural glacial process is significant in its metaphoric relation to political narratives of nature, culture, and capital. Here the glacier signals a radical potential for passive retreat in the name of political change.
The glacier itself can be considered an archive of precipitous refuge. Situated within an extended history, the core of the glacier measures time and space. The glacier is a time capsule, freezing waves of water, dissolving and replenishing in a cyclical current. The cracks and crevices produced through moments of glacial erosion signal climatic shifts. The withdrawal of the glacier body gestures metaphoric moments of contemplation and dissolve. The gesture of the glacier in both its accumulation and ablation is unhurried. Its flow and migration propose a consideration for arrested movement whilst petitioning run off, evaporation, and dispersion. This signal for erasure questions the hermetic nature of the archive, petitioning for an action of decay and
re-composition of material form.
This impetus for recombination and composition is familiar within the paintings and fabric assemblages of Ramsay. Each of his works harness a situational composite of assemblage. Within his recombinant canvases, cracks and crevasses linger as points of contact and fermentation. Ramsay is known for his aggregation of found and specially sourced fabric materials including a diverse collection of authorless cross- stitch patterns. His re-combinations cite alternative fashions and trends whilst perpetuating a timeless composition of colour and form. Ramsay actively mixes and transforms meaning within his painterly works, which feed from a vast collection of personally sourced peculiarities. Within this subjective loop of source material, repetition and connection pull together considerations of decorative politics, the space of pleasure in production, and the aesthetics of texture and form. Textiles merge in an abstraction of design and meditation of colour theory, producing intuitive responses from both artist and viewer.
Recently Ramsay has produced an abstract cross-stitch textile of his own, referencing landscape and the melt water process of glacial erosion. The labour of this gesture interfaces the intuitive meditational value of repetitive mechanical production with the personal and often abstracted autobiographical details of the final form. Ramsay’s abstracted patterns yield subjective considerations and imagination. Desert colours merge to meet a horizon of blue glacial tones and shadows. The increments of terrain energize the composition in an emergence of new form. This improvised technique is familiar to Ramsay, as his fabric assemblages and painterly compositions are often unbound from logic and unclear of direct conclusion. The intelligent interventions and autobiographic evaluations of his fabric assemblages consider visual texture as a flow of force that harnesses phantom simulations—touching and affecting the viewer’s psyche. Here the points of contact within the textile assemblage parallel that of the glacial crevasse. They represent folds of time, the enfolded and encoded creases of history’s horizon, which continually unfold around us.
This horizon of historical movement and arrested focus is considered in the geographic measuring of time, presented within Burgess’ most recent paintings. His seemingly abstract compositions reference autobiographic conclusions and political postulations beyond their formal compositional structure. These most recent paintings function as containers of extended process and strategy. They inculcate the passing of time and inevitability of change. In an endgame of anticipation, the paintings combine literal representations of measurement, including: an hourglass, burning cigarette, footprint, and an arm reaching beyond the canvas with a hand formation that gestures spatial depth. The muted colour palette places time and its accompanying anxieties into architectural-like compartments of organization. Here Burgess considers the anxious anticipation of an endgame as relative to the expiration of a person or place, the literal dissolve and decay of physical form, political autonomy, and saving grace.
Burgess’ continual focus on time, strategy, and endgame is also represented in his textural wood panel paintings that visualize arbitrary game board grids, such as those found within chess and checkers, or Sudoku and crossword puzzles. Here, room for personal subject matter creeps within the matrix of his strategic representations in the form of game pieces and formal still life compositions. Imaginary models of exchange with no end or beginning contradict the impulse to conclude or systematically define the parameters of exchange. Moments of individual contemplation are voluntarily open to interpretation. The painterly form and materiality of his muted scenes transfer the aura of an open bedroom window and the shifting light of the night sky horizon. This aura continues while being represented as in a moment of suspended overtime, pondering blended experience of interior and exterior awareness. A slip, a creep, a creak in the night—here time shares the momentum of the glacier in its occupation of past, future, and present existence.
In a surface of connections Burgess and Ramsay provide an informal expression of political rupture. Spanning historical perception by way of abstraction their works draw horizon lines that engage with imaginary realms of infinite potential. The individual works provide a dialogue, between one another, of non-linear form, connecting oscillating patterns of visible and invisible currents. These act to transform and shape the ever-shifting horizon of our world. This voluntary incoherence allows for alternative perspectives in linking Burgess and Ramsay’s practices. Their individual and singular works function autonomously whilst collaborating—personal and political undercurrent of proposition. The Retreat of the Horstman allows hindsight, and future projection, of how to be in a world at a continued moment of crisis—a continued moment of retreat.
-Jenn Jackson
