Modal Soul: George Carr & Brook Hsu
June 12, 2021 – July 17, 2021
Et al. Gallery
620 Kearny St.
Generalizations of the landscape that hold the capacity to move us are only possible to be made within the terms of the visual and material language of painting when the artist sees no separation of themselves from nature. They are themselves nature. Here, landscape is not presented as a representation of the soul; it is a visual experience for intuiting its form.
If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable. . . . I dreamt, once, that I was there. . . . Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy.
In this quote from Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights, the subject pays no heed to what is fact or fiction. There is no question whether heaven is a place or not. It’s simply stated that it would cause her misery. The contemplation of heaven and the fear and anguish caused by not belonging produces a terrible joy when she realizes her home. “Home” here could be viewed as an identification with the self, no longer dissociated from the self, but embraced.
In logic, modality affirms possibility, impossibility, necessity or contingency. The formal reality of the soul - the modal soul - represents its form as opposed to substance, meaning the shape of the thing takes precedence over the definition of its constituents. As Etel Adnan writes in Shifting the Silence:
Imagination arrives from the cosmos’s farthest reaches and elects our brain the way it would a harbor, establishes its headquarters, and soon starts its misdoings. But what would we have done with it? Hell would have been tidier.
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George Carr’s works include wall mounted sculptures consisting of blocks of wood and stainless steel spheres, with titles such as “Between Heaven and Earth” and “Worlds Apart”, which suggests meditations on duality. Also included are oil paintings which depict swirling, tree-like forms that create forests with pockets of calm.
Brook Hsu includes a suite of new small oil paintings on pieces of lumber. Continuing three themes that the artist has continuously returned to in her work, Hsu paints the tree, the sound and the skull, allowing the repeated compositions to adjust to the size of each piece of wood.
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George Carr (b. 1990) lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions include: Galerie CC, Malmo, Sweden; Crossley Gallery, Sarasota, Florida. Recent group exhibitions include: Deli Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Abrons Art Center. Carr earned a MFA in Painting and Printmaking from The Yale School of Art in 2016 and a BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2012.
Brook Hsu (b. 1987) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Manual Arts, Los Angeles; Et al., San Francisco; Bortolami Gallery, New York; Bahamas Biennale; Deli Gallery, Brooklyn. Select group exhibitions include those at TANK, Shanghai; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; CLEARING, New York and Jan Kaps, Cologne. American Art Catalogues will release a forthcoming monograph and edition. Hsu will be featured in upcoming solo shows at Edouard Malingue, Hong Kong and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin as well as a group show curated by Chris Sharp at X Museum, Beijing, China.