Look Where Time Takes You

Good evening everyone, and welcome to the Regis Center for Art. For those of you who don’t know me, I am Howard Oransky, director of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery here in the Department of Art.

We are celebrating the opening of two exhibitions today, The Women and Money Project in the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, and Look Where Time Takes You in the Quarter Gallery.

I’d like to thank our gallery staff for doing a fabulous job installing these exhibitions. I am grateful to Terez Iacovino, Hillary Price, Adam Kirk, Marc LaPointe, Prerna Jambunathan and Keith Murphy.

Look Where Time Takes You is an exhibition of two Minnesota artists: Lynn A. Gray and Kimchi Hoang. Lynn is a retired member of the Department of Art faculty and Kimchi earned her degree in our program. The commonality of their artwork extends from life experiences based upon a purpose of place captured through drawing and painting, writing and music, as influenced by Mexico for Lynn and Vietnam for Kimchi. Embodied in their work is a language of abstract and representational imagery derived from the culture and the land in which they have lived and worked.

For 15 years Lynn has traveled to a remote location In the state of Guerrero, Mexico, where there existed a rural outpost, without electricity, situated on the edge of the Pacific Ocean surrounded by vast space, desert, and the Sierra Madre Mountains. Lynn has lived and work in that place as it gave him the distance he sought and a basic life style where his senses were stimulated and guided by the dichotomy of nature as wilderness, and nature as commodity, and how the indelible sensations of the two affect our own human psyche. The lure of distance, the purpose of place, and searching for enrichment carries on for him in the southwestern United States and Costa Rica.

Kimchi emigrated from South Vietnam to the United States in 1996. Her work is an intense, emotional response to the living, breathing world she inhabits. Through her paintings, the artist offers us a glimpse of the war-ravaged landscape that was a part of her life in Vietnam. She links both natural and man-made elements representing landscapes of both the physical and metaphysical worlds. Kimchi’s work reminds us that people who live through fire and wars find their daily lives dislocated in many different ways. They try to go on living normal lives, but they are forever scarred by painful memories.

The artworks produced by Lynn and Kimchi exist in a world that is delineated and defined by four modes of experience: the landscape, the body, the passage of time, and the persistence of memory. Each of these modes are fractured and multiplied and both of these artists, each in their own way, combine and recombine these elements into the structure that guides their work.

The landscape of their work is both an exterior landscape and an interior landscape. The exterior landscape of their work is the experience of Mexico and Vietnam, the interior landscape of their work is the psychologial interpretation of that experience.

The body in their work is both the fully-realized form drawn by Lynn and then deconstructed into torn shards, and the dismembered bodies, floating in the rivers of war as remembered by Kimchi.
The passage of time is both the perfect abstraction of time as measured in the thythm of music and the void that eclipses time during the creation of art. As artists we operate in a fourth regesiter of time: an indeterminate space comprised of the past, the present, the future.

And finally, their work is defined by the persistence of memory. The memory which guides their work is imperfect and inescapable. But, it is memory which makes us human. Memory offers us the chance to become who we were meant to be, that is, the chance to become better artists, better human beings.

This idea of the fractured mode of experience is intrinsic to the modern era and to our concepts of modernity, including the concepts of modern and post-modern art. In her essay “The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity,” Linda Nochlin interrupted her narrative of formalist discourse on ninteenth century French painting to observe,

“So far, I have been dealing quite literally with the body in pieces, the fragmented body and its variable significations in the visual representation of the modern period. But what of the larger implications of the topic, what of that sense of social, psychologial, even metaphysical fragmentation that so seems to mark modern experience – a loss of wholeness, a shattering of connection, a destruction or disintegration of permanent value that is so universally felt in the nineteenth century as to be often identified with modernity itself?”

This is the conundrum of our existence and this is the value of art. Even as the answers elude us, art helps us to continue formulating the questions. We are grateful to Lynn Gray and Kimchi Hoang for having the courage to make these images and to ask these questions.