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Barbara Drucker
Masako Takahashi
Robin McCauley
Diane Katsiaficas

Curated by Barbara Drucker

January 29 - April 8, 2005
Reception: Saturday, January 29, 6 - 8pm
1639 18th Street, Santa Monica

18th Street Arts Center presents the group art show, "Quiet Time," curated by Barbara Drucker, Chair of the UCLA Art Department, January 29 - April 8, 2005 at 18th Street Arts Center, 1639 18th Street, Santa Monica. The reception will be Saturday, January 29, 6-8pm. The show opens and runs simultaneously with "Spasmicosmics," new sculpture and visual art by Christine Nguyen. Both exhibitions are funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

The delicate, beautiful sculptural works in "Quiet Time" explore the nexus between subtle strands of thought and experience that constitute the essence of the stated theme. Silence, time, memory, hidden language, paralysis, and gesture are all evoked both passively and aggressively by the works in the exhibition. Obscured skeletons and fugitive words hidden in time are traced in Masako Takahashi's Shawl and Scroll. Diane Katsiaficas's Silk Glove captures the paralysis that alternates between realism and idealism. Silent exclamations of image, memory, and action are found in Robin McCauley's Hair Pumps. The viewer is witness to spiraling sensations of his own personal history in Barbara Drucker's Braided Rug with Ball.

IS IT TIME YET?
Essay by Denise Spampinato

"Questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their union, should be put in terms of time rather than space." - Henri Bergson

Some of the words commonly used to describe time are: objective, chronological, subjective, psychological, synchronic...long, short, anxious, deranged. Mad time. Out-of-joint time. The list goes on. Quiet time, that most rare and precious arrangement of time, is important, not only because it invites quiet contemplation, but also because it enfolds within itself all the other aspects of time. Quiet time is the fertile ground from which a perception germinates and potentially becomes an action, in spite of the fact that sometimes, even when vigilantly looking, no action is perceived and nothing seems to happen or change. Yet, as is so often the case, upon further reflection, one realizes that everything happens inside one's self, in subjective time, when one's physical presence brings no perceptible change to one's surroundings...in quiet time.

Braided Rug with Ball
By Barbara Drucker

A cozy abyss softens the corner of a white room like a promise, as only the uncanny can do. It is a large spirally woven rug, hung loosely from a wall, and unraveled at the hem, revealing its thick bristled thread, an umbilical cord at the scene of its making or undoing. It's propped up at the four corners like someone drunk, body splayed open, but with pleasure nestled somewhere within. Yes, those are tree rings that you see, a cross-section of where it has been that is now held up for all to see. A coloring book of memory. Memory as sensation. Hypnotic aspirations composed from the secret grace of thrown away things or overlooked ideas. Spiraling adventures, mind-twisting fantasies of freedom and pride conjured out of abysmal failures. Pleasure pulls at the hem; a pleasure that forms and deforms. Braided Rug with Ball. The tension of matter and memory remains, and it is in this tension that things become readable, visible, audible and imaginable.

Shawl and Scroll
By Masako Takahashi

There are hidden skeletons and fugitive words. There are skeletal structures of written languages - their grammar, syntax, and phonemes - and then, there are glances, gaits and gesticulations - the vernacular sign language of the street. Language becomes inscribed, through use and abuse, upon the body and soul but how does one extract a translation, a general principle from the particularities of a thousand detailed experiences? Recorded here are the dilemmas of someone who decides to trust her intuition. Shawl and Scroll. The artist as graphologist elaborates a taxonomy of patterns derived from written marks, and embroiders with her hair the mask of a language long buried or barely imagined.

Hair Pumps
By Robin McCauley

A dainty pair of shoes has grown a long black tail, a mane, a beard. They are now pointing, right to left, towards undisclosed mutations. It is common knowledge that there are images only the blind can see, and sounds only the aphasic can utter, dance steps only the lame can take and music only the deaf can compose. There are self-induced linguistic disruptions that release ample doses of adrenaline from phobias and fears. Hair Pumps. They are obscene, grotesque and exhilarating exclamations, which came about, as all perceptions do, from the osmosis of images, memories, and actions, in the movement of time.

Silk Glove
By Diane Katsiaficas

Time is entanglement, visions blurred by deja vu. The paralysis of a thousand familiarities. Between the desire of what should be and what is, between realism and idealism, there is the paradox of matter: it cannot exercise powers of any kind other than those that we perceive. In between one action and another, there is the rest and there is the dreaded ticking. The before, the NOW and the after. The dance of the trio. Silk glove. The dancer is lost in the dance. The hand is lost in the glove. Sit still for a long time and you too will become unrecognizable, licked by the passage of time. Ringlets lazily moving in one direction, then another, like the tracings of a dozing hand on paper. These are fetishes to exorcise the uncanny. A silk glove, animated or arrested by a gentle rustle of hair, is calling us or waving a long goodbye. Time is like a call or a passing by, something akin to loving (rather than love).

18th Street programs are supported by the James Irvine Foundation, California Community Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, National Endowmwnt for the Arts, Santa Monica City Cultural Affairs Division, L.A. County Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Foundation, J. Paul Getty Grant Program, and others.

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