Multiple Expanse / Carolyn Code
Text by Hannah Keating
Opening: Friday March 6, 2020, 6 – 10 pm
Closing Party: Saturday March 28, 2 – 6 pm
Gallery Hours Saturday & Sundays, 11am – 5pm
The world is constantly expanding. It looks like lava crawling to the ocean to form expanded shores. Like seeds on the wind, or concrete towering into the sky. And while species churn through time, defining new geometries and proliferating into new territories, the cosmos reach ever further to unknowable limits. In Multiple Expanse, Carolyn Code exhibits four works for the first time, all of which reflect on and express the notion of expansion.
Borrowing its name from the reproductive structure of a family of fungi, Peridiole, for instance, sends spore-like vessels adrift to meander, repopulate. Made from paper and painted pink, the work’s fleshy, generative character contrasts with the quiet and unyielding qualities of Sum of its Parts. Taking cues from the manufactured spaces of urban architecture, this work reflects on the natural striving to take up space in built environments; maybe both humans and non-human builders come to mind.
Multiple Expanse and the Event Horizon series find kinship and inspiration in twentieth-century artists like Emma Kunz and Sophie Taeuber-Arp who used the expressive potential of geometry and, in the latter case, textile design to produce artworks imbued with energy and harmony. Code achieves both in a quietly explosive installation of coloured thread and punch needle works that capture the tension between expansion and contraction. Event Horizon I, II, and III, in particular, illustrate expansion’s opposite—recession and collapse—in beautifully rendered black holes. Through organic shapes and hard-edge lines, Code’s exhibition foregrounds this cycle of growth and decline, highlighting the beauty of her materials and embracing fresh colours and themes in a focused survey of new work.
Ludmila Gallery 