J. Parker Valentine: Twist

In an era in which our perception of physicality is so often mediated, and flattened, by small handheld screens, J. Parker Valentine’s Twist is an exhibition of monumental planar structures and gestural loops that redirect attention back to our surroundings. Sculptures and drawings made with raw graphite, canvas, steel, and well-worn lariat rope are suggestive of elusive diagrams and impractical tools; they inspire a physical response, though the task at hand remains mysterious. Valentine repeats shapes but resists patterns, encouraging a tactile engagement with materiality without the need for a more linear narrative.

Two rooms experiment with expansion and contraction, and play with formal dualities by adding loopholes. In the first room a nine-panel folding screen divides the space in half, yet it opens up pathways. A metal gate with hanging lassos does not restrict or block sight lines: instead, it frames or “circles” different viewpoints. Its light steel framework and modular structure suggests the potential for expansion. Shadows cast by the natural daylight animate the sculpture and untether it from its static position. The second room, by contrast, closes in. A free-standing wall positioned at an angle architecturally corrals the space. On the adjacent wall, a floor-to-ceiling drawing on canvas compresses the sculptural gestures presented in the first room onto a two-dimensional surface; for example, smudged graphite and ink resemble the patina on steel, and bursts of pink, blue, green, and yellow match the colors of the frayed lariat ropes. Although the canvas is remarkably flat–media absorbs directly into the weave–layers upon layers of mark making give the pictorial rendering depth and dimension. With a deft hand, the artist activates forms and forces within, creating an ever-shifting plotline. Valentine draws an impossible snake that darts in and out of view. We cannot make head nor tail…

Artist Naoki Sutter-Shudo writes on J. Parker Valentine’s endeavor:

There is something akin to improvisational music in the way Valentine’s works are made and in the way they unfold. Parts come together to form a whole, which in turn dictates how subsequent parts will arise. The peripheral defines the center, yet the center is never static and no single element will ever assume dominance as the center. To experience Valentine’s works is to feel vibrations that in turn contract and expand, and to freely tune into a frequency or into another one.

The two-dimensional can become three, and vice versa, just as something abstract can quickly oscillate into the realest of reals and in the next moment oscillate back into pure abstraction. Materials are openly themselves and do not lie about their nature, yet their transformation, whether actual or virtual, point to an elsewhere that goes beyond a simple binary: something can be just that thing, but it can also be its opposite, without contradiction. One is tempted to quote Walter Pater: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.”