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Email PageThe Trepanation Series
September 8, 2005- October 8, 2005
Constance Brady
Magnan Projects
317 10th AveMagnan Projects is pleased to present Constance Brady and Maya Onoda as the gallery's inaugural exhibitions. This will be the artists' first solo exhibitions in New York . The exhibit will be on view from September 8 through October 8, 2005.
Trepanation, a controversial medical procedure in practice since the New Stone Age is the art of drilling holes into the human skull, which many believe has psychotherapeutic benefits allowing one to achieve a higher level of consciousness,. In The Trepanation Series , Constance Brady bores tunnels into the canvas of her paintings straight through to the sheetrock wall of the art gallery. Her method addresses “the stresses conferred upon an artist by painting-as-practice… by blemishing conventionally attractive paintings I have realized and announced true paragons of beauty.” By electively intruding upon a revered surface (the brain, the canvas), a higher level of awareness is exposed.
The seven pieces in the Trepanation series on exhibit present conventional imagery such as portraits, landscapes, seascapes and still lives. What Brady has done to these works, however, is a strict departure from preconceived notions of a safe image; “by assertively and strategically ripping, tearing and digging holes in comfortable images that have, until now, been casually acknowledged by the art spectator as ‘sufficient art'… The surface of each is bored at a point of compositional and metaphysical pressure, propagating an intense response via the new phantom image.”
Maya Onoda 's artwork is her tool to communicate beyond language. Each painting is a landscape of signs and veiled secrets that often resist decoding. Onoda creates a visual diary by interweaving layers of paper, fabric, inks and watercolor. She often incorporates materials such as old bed sheets and coffee stained fabrics to imbue a sense a history and the passage of time. Onoda explains, “History stimulates my imagination. In Japan , when a child pees in their bed, the mother humorously praises a child by saying ‘You made a great map on the sheet.'” Coffee stains are likened to “continents drawn on the world map. I trace those stains and repeat the outlines as if to grow them like increasing tree rings.” Abstracting these objects perpetuates layers of mystery.
The topographical collage is filled with sophisticated tracings of a classicist and the imaginative doodles of a child. A drawing of a camel is just as likely to be found in the hollows of the construct as an abstracted spider web crisscrossed by stitching. Hers is a flat world that collapses unto itself around the edges, yet manages to remain open to the viewer, negotiating the told and untold.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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