SOLAR: Jeffrey Rinehart and Kathy Rodriguez
The New Orleans Healing Center
2372 St. Claude Ave., New Orleans, LA 70117
September 10 - October 2, 2022
Opening Reception: September 10, 2022, 6-8 p.m.
https://jeffreyrinehart.com/ / https://www.kathyrodriguez.info/
Artists’ Statement
Jeffrey Rinehart and Kathy Rodriguez’s paintings, cameraless photographs, and sculpture explore the familiar, observable world through a deceptively abstract to non-representational visual language. Both artists conceptually and technically approach the energy of light and the history of depicting landscape. Both artists also push and pull their materials with a painterly gesture, extracting from the weighted history of this medium a fresh experience of looking – the one human sense that relies on the element of light.
Rinehart drips, pools, and sands Flashe paint over sculptural surfaces that evoke the figure in small-scale, three-dimensional forms. These forms may inhabit the landscapes he imagines by oxidizing copper plates, resulting in imagery that suggests Superfund sites, places in the landscape that are permanently damaged by human abuse. The oxidized surface is forever entrapped and disallowed from spreading or changing because of the resin with which he coats it. Inevitably, this indicates climate change and its encroaching shadow over the landscape, enabling its metamorphosis. He refers to the traditional categorizations of the landscape as beautiful, picturesque, and sublime, but also invites the viewer to consider the ephemeral nature of landscape because of climate change as well as the mutable notion of beauty. In achromatic cameraless photographs, also named “rayograms” by their inventor, Man Ray, Rinehart depicts shredded filmstock which he placed over photo-sensitized paper and exposed to light. Rinehart questions what happens to photography by playing with its filmic surface, and further extends this process into the digital realm by scanning and printing the prints. He offers the terms “scanograms” or “scanography” to describe them. Warhol’s experimentation with copying the copy provides a framework for understanding how images, and therefore content, deteriorates or at least changes over time.
Rodriguez’s oil paintings on linen or canvas use glazed hues that allow light to pass through and from them, reflecting varied wavelengths of energy to the subjective eye and brain. More textured passages of impasto represent the three-dimensional forms that are fixed in the sky but appear to move across it, much like illusions made with paint. Rodriguez recalls landscape painting from the mid-19th century to the early modernists of the 20th century, where imagination, expressive brushstroke, consideration of the ever-changing quality of light and the flatness of paint, and burgeoning abstraction to honor that frankness of the two-dimensional surface began to gain momentum and heat. The paintings depict abstractions of skies and landscapes illuminated with solar or lunar energy. In fact, the two are somewhat inseparable, as the sun lends a rosy tint to the Earth’s own rocky satellite, resulting in “blood moons,” and its bright lantern shines upon it in various moon phases. Both cast shadows over each other during eclipses. Rodriguez explores concepts and practices related to mindful awareness and moon- and sun-gazing. The former suggests meditation and contemplation as a healthy framework that tempers the danger of the latter, which is referent to the terrible way humans can tend to veer toward dangerous and unhealthy behaviors, even death, throughout mythology and reality. Suns depicted with solar flares echo the form of the coronavirus body, which is named for a solar phenomenon: the usually hidden, outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere.
Both artists consider the concept of burning with light, which happens when we stare at the sun for too long. Some works also regard the formation of black holes, which are actually stars that implode upon themselves. The gravity of this natural process sucks all light away. The images convey ideas about these kinds of processes and changes that are inextricably linked to living in this world.
