Michael Childress: Toward Ourselves in an Unknown

HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce the opening of Toward Ourselves in an Unknown, a solo exhibition featuring graphite drawings, stained composite panels, and a bench collaboration by Michael Childress.

 

Childress has long been interested in the way that abstraction provides a language to describe complex reality through simplified spatial models, often using them as points of entry to ponder the mechanics of the universe. In his third solo-presentation with the gallery, Childress debuts a new body of work inspired by the light cone diagram in special relativity, which illustrates the trajectory of light as seen by an observer at any present moment, essentially giving shape to the experience of perception itself.

 

Known for his stained canvases that combine hard-edge geometries with fluid transitions of color, Childress creates compositions that serve as field recordings for invisible forces like gravity and surface tension at play. Whereas in his canvases, circular forms saturate and radiate outward; in his newer panels, he flips the two-dimensional circle on its side in favor of the rectilinear. Graphite drawings referencing the hourglass-shaped schematic feature rotating discs along a central axis, alluding to both wavelengths of light emanating at various widths and distances as well as panoramic images cycling before a stationary viewer.

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Turning to plywood as a substrate, Childress complicates the relationship between image and object, catapulting what is typically designated as a frame or support into the foreground. Against a backdrop of shifting fields of color are centralized vignettes resembling washy, painterly landscapes, reminiscent of en plein air watercolors the artist has made in recent years. These impressionistic snapshots are analogous to photons at the moment of perception, moving across space and time in the way that memories focus and fade in our minds.

 

While Childress intensifies his colors through successive stain applications, suggesting a deepening into the recesses of the picture plane, these interior scenes break away from the rest of the composition, bulging outward and asserting their object-like status. Spilling into the space of the gallery and acknowledging a greater dialogue between the decorative and utilitarian, is a custom bench created in collaboration with David Erickson of Massachusetts-based Boxco Studios. Stained and adorned with the same applications as the wall works, the bench invites audiences to take a seat.

 

The exhibition’s title, Toward Ourselves in an Unknown, borrows a line from a 1950s Frank O’Hara poem about an enlightened way of looking out onto the world. Describing the perception of the color green from a vegetal leafy surface down to its microscopic layers of chlorophyll, represents for Childress the possibilities of the unobservable, before light travels towards ourselves into the present moment and continues thereafter back into the unknown.