Curated by Maria Hinel: The Logic of Place

Bringing together works by Shawanda Corbett, Pam Glick, Naotaka Hiro, Emily Kraus and Brie Ruais, The Logic of Place considers the encounter between the artist’s body and material as a site of reciprocal exchange. Stepping away from the conventional view of the non-human world as passive and inert, the works in the exhibition in distinct ways position materials as vital players in the act of making. The surface and substance of canvas or clay envelop and touch the body, responding to and inflecting its movements, hesitations, and accelerations in space.

Specific and structured modes of mark-making emerge throughout the exhibition, from the predetermined logic of a gesture, to a set weight of material, to a mechanism that orients the body in close proximity to the canvas. Within these parameters, the process becomes dialogic – each action elicits a material response that, in turn, redirects what follows. Form does not proceed from a preconceived image but unfolds progressively through the process itself. By adjusting the range of their actions, the artists reveal a nuanced awareness of the intricate web of connections between bodies and objects – of a kind of relational ‘place’ generated though their encounter.

The title of the exhibition draws on the work of Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida (1870-1945) who developed a highly original system of ideas, influenced in part by his Zen practice. The idea of the ‘place’ (basho) was central to his work, advancing a relational view of the world that goes beyond the Western duality of subject and object. Instead of regarding the human being as the only active agent exerting their will upon the passive world, Nishida argued that each body is ‘implaced’ in a field of relations that continually co-determine one another. He writes, “Our selves exist as the self-determination of the active world in which inside is outside and outside is inside.”

For Nishida, this relational field is also fundamental to self-awareness: the self comes to know itself through its encounters with what lies beyond it. The works in The Logic of Place similarly make bodily presence perceptible through traces of movement, scale, pressure, distance and proximity. Experience of the body emerges, therefore, not as a purely inward state, but as something continually formed at the boundary between self and the world. 

— Maria Hinel