Heat Salt Acid Waves at the Painting Gallery @ Uarts

Heat Salt Acid Waves is an exhibition of recent works by Leeza Meksin, Nickola Pottinger, and Padma Rajendran, curated by Lauren Whearty at the Painting Gallery at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pa.  The exhibition opens with a reception on Thursday January 30, 4-6 pm and is on view from January 27 to February 27, 2020

While their stories and subjects range widely, Leeza Meksin, Nickola Pottinger, and Padma Rajendran’s works come together through the process in which they think through material, color, and form.  Images, processes, and other elements ebb and flow in the breadth of their works, as each artists flirts with and crosses the boundaries of many traditional art categories and expectations, especially our expectations of Painting - as both a process and a history. 

Meksin, Pottinger, & Rajendran are all New York based artists who happen live between two different cultures: American and Russian, Jamaican, or Malaysian respectively.  This is but one way to think through the connections amongst their works as existing across categories and working methods such as: abstraction and representation, illusionistic and physical space, drawn/painted and collaged marks.  Their mastery of craft and form makes them comfortable moving between each category in complex and exciting ways as they incorporate surprising combinations of materials, processes, and other elements along the way. 

Whether visually present in each work or not, the body is an important aspect to each artist and represented in a variety of ways - from image based representation to the evidence of physical actions, and our experience of scale. We see it as the actual form of the artwork in Pottinger’s pieces upon which narrative is built. In Meksin’s work we see it through representations but also through the material narrative of spandex, gauze, and other elements meant for stretching across and draping over the human form.  Her stiffened fabrics create architectural elements like doors, and windows which refer to the scrims and screens of paint, as well as the ancient Egyptian use of false doors in tombs which allow the spirit to pass from our wolrd to the next. Rajendran uses the form of jeans as a symbol within her narrative, where the image and its meaning unite as it’s form acts as both the shape of the painting, and the scaffolding for meaning.

For each artist color is a necessity to their work. It is not something merely applied, it is embedded in the marks, materials, feelings, and gestures. It is imperative to the expression of each work, weaving it into their works as it is woven into our contemporary material and cultural world.  Neon and metallic fabrics correspond to performance and dance and enclosure or architecture, while the gritty layers of collage and pastel create a depth of narrative found through the process of drawing itself. Citrus, tropical plants, spices and other elements of taste are brought out through their rich colors and soft forms. 

Through the materials and imagery that each artist incorporates we see an elevation of materials and images of our everyday contemporary experience elevated and transformed into fine art materials in an exciting way.  Making something as ubiquitous as Spandex, jeans, or recognizably collaged items feel unquestionably important, complex, and appropriate to our relationship with the stuff of life is an amazing feat which Meksin, Pottinger, and Rajendran accomplish with ease and bravado.