Geometric Spirits: Johnny Adimando & Catherine V. Graham

Geometric Spirits features etchings and paintings by Johnny Adimando & Catherine V. Graham.  Both artists work across media between painting and printing to create a rich sense of space and complexity of pattern.  Exploration between surfaces and techniques create visual structures to explore different conceptual investigations.

Graham employs geometry to push perceptions of the viewer’s understanding of natural and  social sciences. Adimando exploits intricate motifs, symbols, and patterning to expose the spirituality and socially rogue attributes of omnipresent forces.

Patterns merge and emerge, revealing much of the viewer as the work seeks to create or obfuscate itself.

Catherine V Graham is an abstract painter and printmaker whose work investigates the formal aspects of color and form, while creatively referencing the social and natural sciences.  Graham questions human fate’s relationship within the rational and irrational, natural and constructed worlds.

Graham is attentive to possible ways the viewer will perceive and experience the work (which is dependent both upon the lighting and physical position) and results in a perpetually shifting quality.  This constantly shifting state signifies the complexity of space and time as well as the breadth and limitations of human perception.

Through explorations of perception, Graham strives to make complex patterns visible in order to explore overlapping meaning within the social and natural sciences.

 

Johnny Adimando grew up in a series of small but highly decorated and intricately organized spaces. Proper arrangement was paramount, and even the slightest unsanctioned adjustments to this domestic-utopia lead to complete chaos. He quickly learned the camouflaging properties of beauty, the navigation of claustrophobic interiors, and the absolute virtues of order and cleanliness, omnipresence and control. He believes that the world, whether the creation of a god(s), or a network of nations tightly-monitored by ruling governments, exists as a panopticon, where rogue entities and ideologies burgeon in clandestine-processes of unlearning, defiance, and stealth.

Adimando suggests the “otherworldly” by presenting an aggregate of information, that in its micro and macrocosmic forms still manages to preserve a tether to the indecipherable. He is intrigued by the questions: Have I been misplaced, or displaced…and, what is it to be out-of-place? As such, these graphic messages, although filtered, are inevitably transmitted in a seemingly tertiary “signiconic” or codex-like form; a visual-language that bridges the cosmic and terrestrial, crystallizing all-while dissipating, and which harmonizes as it obfuscates.

He explores formal dynamics related to the representation of divinity, self-imprisonment, and ritual (tied to both dogma and spirituality). He focuses primarily on systems/structures of authority, ideas about armoring oneself against the world, and accessioning primordial escapist urges. By designing, manipulating, and reassembling a wide variety of appropriated and original motifs and symbols, he develops highly detailed sculptures, drawings, photographs, and printed matter. The visual dynamic is one of complicated symmetries, coordinated patterns, and complex constructions that form a symbiosis with elaborate codifications, spectral visions, and occult symbology.