T. KELLY MASON
2015-07-20With a background in music and poetry, T. Kelly Mason’s visual vocabulary is both spare and expressive, uncovering meaningful associations between seemingly disparate elements. For over two decades, Mason has produced work across a range of media, including sound, video, installation, painting, and sculpture, addressing the relationships between reality, perception, representation and interpretation. In his current exhibition, Mason uses these relationships as lenses to examine dichotomies of scale: internal vs. external, human vs. cosmic, actual vs. imagined.
One of Mason’s new works depicts Barnett Newman’s The Wild, now in MoMA’s permanent collection, as seen at the Betty Parsons Gallery. When this tall slender painting was first exhibited by Parsons in 1951, its peculiar stature bewildered and intrigued viewers. Measuring 8 feet tall by only 1.5 inches wide, The Wild commands attention and engages active viewership with its human-like uprightness and more-than-human height. Indeed, the scalar relationship of the artwork to the viewer was of primary importance to Newman who claimed, “Size doesn’t count. It’s scale that counts. It’s human scale that counts… One of the nicest things anyone ever said about my work… is that when standing in front of my paintings that you had a sense of your own scale.” Mason preserves this effect by re-creating through paint and collaged lighting gels The Wild in its life-size proportions. Moreover, he references the work’s figurative scale – and its importance to art history – by illustrating it in the hallowed and sometimes harrowing 21st-century flow of information and ideas.
Opposite – KeyHole Satellite USA-161 (Conceptual Rendering-Actual Photos of USA-161 are Classified) Nile River Twilight, 2015
Exhibition runs through to August 1st, 2015
Cherry and Martin
2712 S. La Cienega Blvd / 2732 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles
CA 90034
