CAPTURED SPACES

Some people make art. Others live and breathe art. For them, art is a second pulse: a confirmation, a measure, and ultimately, an affirmation of life’s presence, beauty, and meaningfulness. The works of the three artists brought together by curator Alan Goolman in “Captured Spaces”– Stanford Kay, Ann Proven, and David Provan– share some similarities: all the works can be seen as “geometric abstractions,” though Kay, in particular, does not think this designation fits exactly. More importantly, all three approach making art not only as a vocation but also as a way of life and a way of knowing.

The Provans, who are married, often spend their evenings sitting at a table together with their sketch pads and notebooks sharing a large assortment of pens and Prismacolor pencils, drawing. These drawings are sometimes the impetus leading to larger works. Some of Ann Provan’s acrylic paintings in this exhibition are examples, though Ann reports that the penned and penciled works are not careful studies for the finished pictures but rather starting points for further explorations.

Kay, a native of Brooklyn, currently lives and works in Nyack, New York, and has recently begun to meditate on the structure of the self and the relationship between internal and external spaces, both physical and emotional. Reflecting on the changes brought about by COVID-19 and his own personal history, empathy has served as a guide in his most recent work—regarding our ability to reach out to others in times of need and share experiences despite the isolation necessitated by the past year.

David Provan left the Navy after four and a half years serving in the Vietnam War flying over battle zones and tracking typhoons as a radar operator. Given a choice of where to be discharged, he chose New Delhi over his native California. It was time for a change. He wound his way northward through India passing through the territory where Buddha woke up, finding himself eventually at the door of a Tibetan monastery where he remained for a year or so. Visas expired, he returned to the US, his path altered forever. Ann, who grew up in Berkeley and spent many years in France, met David in Soho in 1986. In 2006 they moved to the Hudson Valley.

The point of putting the work of these three artists together in one space is to foster awareness of the distinctiveness of each by encouraging the viewer to focus on their differences of purpose, process, and realization. And also to engender deeper insights into the meanings each is striving to express for themselves and convey to others.

The green that backgrounds the stressed caged and caging forms of Kay’s “Rupture” painting has a radically different intent than the greens that convey the slowly shifting light of time passing in Ann Provan’s “The Hours.” The quietly curving enclosure of an open circular form composing David Provan’s sculpture “Cartesian Phrenology” is quite unlike the irregular angular grid barely containing the multi-colored jumble of Kay’s “Remembrance of Things.” Kay’s picture is full of abstracted memory, Provan’s sculpture evokes Buddhism’s light-filled “emptiness.”

The gallery visitor might also consider the contrast between the twists and turns of the cropped Tibetan Endless Knot animated by triangles pulsing across and just below the surface of David Provan’s painting “Motivated Material” and Ann Provan’s gentle spacial ironies bathed in Renaissance light revealed in “Tango.”

Take Kay’s “Torso” as another example and compare it to Ann Provan’s ”Totem” or David Provan’s sculpture “WeLiveWithinEachOthersWounds.” All three of these works reference the body even if only elliptically. Stanford’s title specifically alludes to human anatomy though he strongly rejects figuration of any kind. Close examination of the painting reveals that each underlying form stops short of clear definition by being either cropped, partially covered, or otherwise interrupted. The overlaying grid is more complete, but is rendered with barely resolved contradictions that seem neverthelss to achieve a hard won resolution. So this is not a picture of a body but a coming to terms with the instability and the feeling of incompleteness to which the body and the mind are subject.

Ann’s totemic painting piles up forms in a way that could suggest the stacking of ancestral heads in a totem pole or the verticality of a heroic standing figure. The dark blues and greens create an atmosphere of what could be ancestral awe and mystery or just the night sky a bit after sunset and before the deep darkness sets in. There is a solemnity and presence in this work, but there is also an instability created by its off-centeredness and the spatial uncertainty created by the ambiguous shapes in the lower half of the painting. A reflection perhaps of the fact that we live in a time of anxiety and doubt.

David’s sculpture about life and its wounds escapes even his own verbal eloquence to describe. In it he sees the interconnectedness of Mother and Child, Male and Female, and for that matter, everything else. An observer gazing at it might wonder at its lightness given that the piece is made of steel. It’s the lightness of nothing extraneous. Underlying all David’s work are years of thinking about concepts like the relationship of figure and ground. He sees reality through an Eastern prism, having left behind the Western view in Vietnam. He notes that science and Dharma agree that most of reality, 99.99 percent of it, is empty space. He also notes that he has no interest in verisimilitude. David is aiming at a balance between the emergent figure and the ever-changing ground to which it will inevitably return and then reemerge in a different guise; both figure and ground, like everything and all of us, made of the same cosmic stuff: the residue of the Big Bang. And something (or no thing) else that eludes enunciation.

All three artists whose art is on display in Captured Spaces have chosen to make work we call abstract. Some people see abstraction as devoid of narrative meaning. That may be partially true. It would be more true if one added the word “specific” to the description. An artist once asked a group of friends to describe the meaning of life in 10 words or less. One answer was “Life in itself is meaningless but nevertheless full of meanings.”

Besides the paintings of Stanford Kay and Ann Provan, and the sculptures, drawings, and paintings of David Provan, “Captured Spaces” also includes several examples of David’s ceramic work and one of the many beautiful and critically acclaimed chairs he has designed. The show runs from April 24 to May 23. Opening night is April 24 from 5 pm - 7 pm. Masks are required for entry into the gallery and guests will be admitted to the gallery in small groups. To schedule a gallery visit call: 845-663-2318. The Lockwood Gallery is located at
 

747 Route 28 in Kingston, NY.

- Carl Van Brunt Beacon, NY 4/19/21