“The task of perception entails pulverizing the world, but also one of spiritualizing its dust.”
– Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque
This passage, highlighted in the gallery notes accompanying Catalina Ouyang’s current exhibition Three Betrayals, serves as an excellent point of reference for navigating Ouyang’s rich, fragmentary works.
Through a range of mediums, from video to sculpture to painting and drawing, Ouyang dismantles a slice of the world and asks viewers to find greater meaning in the resultant parts. It’s an exhibition that focuses attention on our corporeal nature, while at the same time seeking to raise our consciousness well beyond the merely physical. And if that sounds a little bit like religious art and relics of the Medieval and Renaissance period, that’s a potentially fair comparison.
It’s perhaps natural to reflect on Scorn of God (Quinn) and Kicked Madonna (Crystal) and draw connections to the relics and reliquaries of long dead saints. The organic nature of the materials (which includes bone, horse hair, oyster shells, and beeswax), combined with their fragmentary nature, serves to evoke a sense of something at once decaying and preserved.
Similarly, the blue/green and red fabric used in Scorn of God (Quinn) would look perfectly natural on a Renaissance Madonna. (See Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch or Luini’s Madonna of the Carnation.) Likewise, the soft blue and white fabrics featured in Kicked Madonna (Crystal) are reminiscent of the color scheme made famous in the glazed terracotta sculptures and reliefs of Lucca della Robbia. As to the somewhat unsettling nature of both works, I’d suggest they’re well in line with (and no more unsettling than) Donatello’s Penitent Magdalene or Grunewald’s Isenheim Alterpiece.
Of course, Three Betrayals was not staged so that those of us who are so disposed could reflect on the stylistic trappings of Renaissance art or the desiccated bits of dead saints. Ouyang is onto something more personal and thereby more expansive than that.
The single channel video Three Betrayals runs in the main gallery and intersperses the choreography of Lu Yim and Eloise Deluca with bits of home movies, conversations, texts and stories. As if setting off ripples in an otherwise still pond, fragments from the video are manifest in works throughout the show. The flowing fabrics and pleated skirts of Yim’s dancers are reprised in Scorn of God (Quinn) and Kicked Madonna (Crystal). A tattoo that appears during an overheard conversation on a couch reappears in Betty (Relapse Selfie). The poet Anne Sexton materializes in grainy black and white film in the video projection, and then again times three in a series of stark portraits. Ouyang has packed a lot into Three Betrayals, and in that sense, the 40-plus minute video serves as a touchstone (Rosetta Stone?) for the whole of the exhibition.
That’s in large part because there’s something very candid and very forthcoming at work in the video; weaving familial history with questions and recollections in a way that’s personal without being strictly narrative. That these intimate passages alternate between choreography that features intertwined dancers trying to make sense of the space they inhabit (and one another) adds a physical urgency to the question of finding our place in the world.
Three Betrayals is rounded out with a selection of two-dimensional works. Those being the aforementioned ballpoint pen portraits Anne I, Anne II, and Anne III, as well as the meta referential painting Betty (Relapse Selfie). If Betty (Relapse Selfie) looks familiar, it’s likely because you’ve seen a similar (identical?) image presented in Gerhard Richter’s famous painting of his 11-year-old daughter.
Ouyang’s two-dimensional works add an anchoring element to Three Betrayals that is critical to the overall pace of the show. Their juxtaposition to the sculptures and video provides an opportunity for viewers to recalibrate and reorient via the familiar. At the same time, these works bolster the exhibition’s thematic scope. They also serve to highlight the breadth of Ouyang’s considerable talents and drive home the notion that the representational and conceptual can indeed work together. Further, it remains refreshing to see an artist willing to embrace a range of visual tools and mediums rather than be shoehorned into a particular look or style.
To that point, know that the interdisciplinary nature of Three Betrayals can be daunting. It’s an exhibition that draws liberally from art, art history, dance, philosophy, and literature. It’s also an exhibition that’s deeply personal. In that regard, Three Betrayals holds its viewers to a high standard. It expects that we’ll pay attention, make connections, seek to understand the experiences of others and be open to exploration. Those who take the time to do that will find that there is much to appreciate in Ouyang’s deft pulverization of the world.
Three Betrayals is on view at No Place Gallery, 1 E. Gay St., through March 4, 2022.
For more information visit, noplacegallery.com.