Art Gallery of Regina

VANISH: Art and Illusion

“Proposition… To state the existence of indeterminate phenomena in the structure and visual reality of the work, and from there to conceive of new possibilities… ”

GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’ Art Visual); Paris, 1962

Optical art starts in the relationship of eye to mind.

Identified by the critical press as mere eye candy when it first exploded on the art scene in 1964, pulsingly hallucinatory Op-Art – the most familiar threads of optical art – failed to correspond to the then prevailing demands of formalist abstraction which insisted that painting be stripped back to its core elements. Rather than offering up abstract values, Op offered up visual fun. Rather than prompting a mystical art experience, Op made us clumsily dizzy. Rather than oppose kitsch, Op became kitsch.

Instead of casting its gaze backward to that period of art history though, Vanish looks at the work of contemporary artists who mobilize Op Art’s aesthetics and perceptual strategies in their work. Unleashing visual instability, their volatile, retinally stimulating paintings, photographs and sculptural objects assert viewing as an active psychological event. Despite their apparent playfulness, they distort what we see and how we see it by disclosing gap spaces where normative, traditionally understandable links break down. Indeed, by alerting us to the mechanics of vision and various models of perception, the work here dissembles the traditional visual languages we have constructed in order to know, structure and represent the world: via optical perception, these fascinating contrary images prompts us to consider our personal and cultural perceptions – thus playing havoc with our relationship to reality.

Jay Gazley’s complex spatial terrains reference urban architectures. Although dominantly comprised of colours linked together as interlocking flat rectilinear shapes, what is revealed is thin tracery of thin white lines between them. These linear networks abstractly map any manner of complex pathways – from digital circuitry to urban transportation routes to the internet. Paralleling but denying the utopianism of Russian Constructivism at turn of the last century (which in some ways these paintings resemble), these complex images are graphical representations that unfold social systems and circuits of meaning operating sub-rosa in the uneasy cultural present.

Jack Anderson