| Exhibition: | Richard Gate, All Things Bright |
| Dates: | 23 April, 2016 through 04 June, 2016 |
| Reception: | Saturday, 23 April, 2016 — 5-7 |
| Location: | Ruth Bachofner Gallery 2525 Michigan Avenue, Suite G2 Santa Monica, CA 90404 |
Ruth Bachofner Gallery is pleased to present All Things Bright, an exhibition of new work by Richard Gate. There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday, April 23, 5-7 PM.
As with Richard Gate's previous work, the pieces in this exhibition gather a host of images adapted from science, popular culture, ancient history, technology, mathematics, folk art, physics, and astronomy. The imagery ranges from highly recognizable symbols such as cave drawings and botanicals, to more esoteric ones that drive an offbeat visual and narrative perspective. Rather than using his typical screen printing process, these are graphite rubbings made from a vast collection of images that collectively present his particular abstract language. Where earlier works were awash with primary colors and floating images, these pieces are exclusively black and white and arranged in tight grid formations, which imparts a fresh modernist sensibility for Gate's short, visual stories.
“One evening,” Gate writes, “after making all of this colourless work and while helping a friend through a dark time and into the light, I, for no reason, opened an old copy of Huxley’s Heaven and Hell and read a few pages on dreams. Lines read long ago and absolutely forgotten seemed to explain why, after all these years, I was back again making black and white images …
The letters in which we write about roses need not be red.
One could explain the source of each of the various images in each of the various works. For example, a certain diagram can illustrate the orbital structure of beryllium and show that beryllium is the source of an emerald’s green lustre. But this clue does not satisfy one’s appetite for the visual elegance of the diagram nor why it seems to relate to eight other equally enigmatic images randomly arranged in a formal grid of nine. Information, memory, nostalgia, invocation and incantation are all words that account for the effect of an arrangement of images on our senses, but the arrangement makes no more sense than being shown a diagram of caffeine and being told that this is why dark chocolate is so delightful ….
…color in dreams yields no information about the personality of the dreamer … the story of these drives and conflicts is told in terms of dramatic symbols and in most dreams the symbols are uncoloured.
Richard Gate received his MFA from Claremont Graduate University. He splits his time between the lake country of Ontario, Canada and Utah.