Reveries and Reflections: Narratives in Abstract Art
In our dreams, the familiar can become strange and the bizarre made believable. Fragments of daily life are woven into seamless narratives where the distinctions between illusion and reality are blurred to the point of abstraction. Exploring the creative links between dreaming, imagination, and storytelling, Audra Weaser and Anthony Hunter investigate the narratives that emerge from the subconscious.
Visual art has always been closely associated with storytelling. Over the centuries, painting and sculpture evolved to illuminate anecdotes of religion, patronage, and power. With the advent of abstraction, many artists associated with the avant-garde rejected the figurative, therefore eliminating explicit narrative content.
In her upcoming exhibition at JoAnne Artman Gallery-New York, Audra Weaser creates dreamscapes from childhood memories, re-imagined and recreated through her artistic process as an adult. Titled after the French word for delirium and being delirious, Reverie refers to the visual qualities of her dreamy landscapes. Offering imagery pulled directly from Weaser’s memories and her distinct interpretations of the surrounding world, the final compositions represent a meticulous document of an especially vivid dream life. Drawing from remembrance and confrontation with nature, the narratives that emerge through her abstractions offer coded messages that are ripe for interpretation.
Anthony Hunter’s evocative abstract paintings are a study in controlled chaos. Urging the viewer to turn inward and forge a connection to a personal evocation, his vibrant color and frantic brushwork present overlapping voices and a cacophony of emotions. Contained within a luscious, glossed surface quality, his works exhibit a color-field sensibility punctuated by a lively, lyrical composition of lines, blobs, drips and drizzles that create a defined sense of movement and action. In unique character, Hunter gives the works extensively detailed, yet humorist, titles that emphasize his unique personification of forms. Hunter’s varying forms and lines become protagonists in an action-landscape while seemingly incidental moments of captivating beauty provide ample room for exploration of theme.
Weaser and Hunter each present different types of narrative implied through their abstractions. Both layering their medium throughout their distinct processes, the depth and texture of the works contributes to an immenseness of presence relaying submergence into sense-memory. Adept at translating their personal narratives and emotions into images, Weaser and Hunter’s stories are the middle ground between the information put into their compositions and the significance and connection viewers add to them.
