Daniel Callis

Displacement, grief, and renewal mark and inform this series of paintings. Embedded in each composition are sampled fragments of drawings done by artist Loren Baker, a close friend who, at the time this series was made, had recently taken his life. The sampled drawings were the last works he made in the weeks before his death. My strategy was to use these fragments of visual disclosure as compositional prompts to mourn and celebrate our friendship.

 Derived from evolving processes, layer upon layer, process on top of process, the surfaces of these paintings are labored and the colors richly saturated. Each work archives conversations between process and material, structure and concept, Loren and myself, moving toward completion, like a palimpsest. Not all of the conversations comprising the paintings are therefore available to the viewer. Some are obscured completely. But the paintings are indeed “Ready to See”: An invitation to attend to and be changed by what is particular in any given process- and relationship-derived surface. These paintings express both grief and gratitude.

A poem by katelyn skye seitz

Practice your resurrection

Taste the rotation of your untwisting.

Never settle for high lofty places

When redemption is in the dirt and the spit.

Feel the promise of wholeness

Play hide and seek in between your muscles and bones.

Wear your skin like it is My story you have to tell.

And tell it well.

Turns out death is not your size, child.

You will outgrow it.

Improvisation means creating or performing something spontaneously, without specific or scripted preparation, beyond, of course, preparation in the language or method of the form. Miles Davis said that there is no such thing as a “wrong” note, per se; the note that’s played next determines whether the previous one was good or bad. In engineering, improvisation aims to address a problem with the tools and materials at hand. In this body of work, the canvases are a site of improvisational action, each a turbulent surface meshing different vectors of movement.

 Or, more accurately, each canvas, presently at rest, came out of such improvisation. The result is visual flux and transformation, evidenced by a progressive series of actions that build, disrupt and rebuild the work. Dense, agitated surfaces and buoyant, open colors rest on the edge of collapse. The surfaces seem to struggle, even fail, and yet assert a commitment to process that is joyous and hopeful. The paintings reach toward meaning but haven’t arrived at a place where that meaning is fixed. The improvised conversation carries on, one hopes, beyond the paintings themselves.

An obstruction impedes or prevents passage or progress. A gate, for example, is a physical form placed at a transitional space working to restrict and direct movement, offering, perhaps, a glimpse of what lies on the other side. But obstruction can also afford opportunity: When the gate is open there is access to the space beyond. When it is closed, you are thrown onto your wits to get through or around it. Paintings work in a similar fashion. Each presents a mediating surface or portal by which our gaze, attention, and imagination are focused, restricted, and expanded. The Obstruction paintings explicitly make such restriction, and possibility, their subject and method.  

These paintings are enthusiastic objects of visual discourse: a bit clumsy, a bit gauche, more than a bit vaudevillian. That is to say, they have been unapologetically built to get and keep the audience’s attention, with garish, high-pitched color combinations and acrobatic, pratfalling forms.

These forms, of course, are material, as the textures of thick paint testify to both a past, human-made process and a three-dimensionality that is present before the viewer. In another vein, they are also, simply, pictures: flat, two-dimensional images referencing external things (for example, signage and landscape). In all of this, the Shift paintings, like all paintings, act as metaphor for what a painting is and does—an object that gestures outward, to its sources, and a thing that simultaneously draws attention to the self-referencing presence of its surface.