Around, Never Through features 7 artists who take the long way on purpose. It is an artistic strategy, indeed a cognitive strategy, that comes with benefits lost in a world which has itself lost its way. Supply chains and commodities markets demand efficiency, but in the realms of understanding, the slow and elliptical path always prevails. The oppositional model of expanded vs. contracted thinking lives uncomfortably within this interconnected post-industrial world; pragmatics always hoping to shed the inconveniences of deeper understanding. That is until efficiency loses its way, then it begs for breadth, knowledge, comprehension, and truth to bail it out. It’s a story of arbitrage versus artistry; analysis vs. synthesis, particles vs. waves…with artists taking the long road precisely because the slow understanding of time, space, and endurance provides bearings that directions alone can’t.
In Around, Never Through, this involves material investigations that border on obsession and impracticality, often in relation to a very specific activity or tradition. It also tends to look to materials and techniques from a pre-digital age. Kelly Agius employs plaster, and aluminum to create her figurative sculpture. Alice Murphy, Steve Higgins and Jesse Butcher use traditional carbon-based drawing media to create time-intensive, detailed drawings of very different sorts. While Makenna Schibler’s textiles reference contemporary imagery, their skills, materials, and sensibilities are as old as the Unicorn Tapestries. Azikiwe Mohammed, a self-described “maker of things” embodies the spirit of an omnivorous artistic creator in the oldest sense of the concept. Cindy Owen’s wall of daggers becomes far less threatening and more compelling when it’s realized that they are finely crafted ceramic replicas. Her work perfectly reflects the thrust ofAround, Never Through, as it strikes first as a useful object, but lingers on in the imagination as a story of time, craft, tradition, and material endurance.