Opening Reception: Thursday, July 21, 2011, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
Joseph Park’s new work represents a personal campaign to identify, develop, and document a genre of painting he calls “Prizmism” that fractures subject and ground in the manner of a prism. His painting process is not unlike an academic discipline in which rigorous study and exercise of his methodology, aided by specifically designed drafting tools, results in accomplished examples of the Prizmism style.
To describe Prizmism’s progress – where it came from and where it’s going - the gallery will be divided into three thematic spaces. In the first gallery, Park shows a bit of his history as a painter and the works that came first – the prototypes, the plasters, the figure studies, as well as the easel and tools fabricated to assist and exercise his practice. In the second gallery, Park exhibits paintings that demonstrate how Prizmism’s styles are differentiated based on what hand or force might have inspired them. The painting HI is an example of how Prizmism can be used to render psychedelic hallucinations of nature through a layering of techniques over the attributes of the artwork. The idea that is can be used as a reincarnator, as in Fathom Redux (the original lost in a fire) speaks to the transformative nature of paint. In Transporter, the style of astral body traveler device is less about the crystallizing of the paint application and more a reference to the concepts of journey and time travel. In the last gallery, a single painting is showcased, Wizard, after “Las Meninas” by Diego Velázquez which has been transmogrified by Park into a Prizmism masterpiece.
On describing Prizmism’s painting process – the choices, the instincts, the energy - Park likened it to the action in a garden of only invasive plants where “the vocabulary of paint, whether it’s grisaille verses color, or one type of Prizmism against another, they collide and overlay, going back and forth until they begin to settle into a cohesive whole, or not.”
Joseph Park was born in Ottawa, Canada, an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Park currently lives and works in Seattle, WA. Park had a solo show at the Portland Art Museum, OR in 2009 and at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA in 2005. A postcard book called JOSEPH PARK: I AM YOURS is being published by Chronicle Books and will be available starting in August 2011. Advance copies will be available at the opening of this exhibition.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10:30 to 5:30; Saturdays 11:00 to 5:00. For more information, please visit our website at www.renabranstengallery.com or contact the gallery directly at (415-982-3292).