Sean Sullivan
Excitations (drawings of concern)

August 4 - September 2, 2023
2831a Mission St.

Reception Friday, August 4th from 5-8pm

There’s a grammar to the work, a grammar of color and form and composition sharing the page.

Imagining these colored dashes, lozenges, simple geometric forms as words, are the totality laid on the 8.5 by 10 inch sheets of paper more like short stories or poems? Maybe they're more like riddles, both for the artist and we, the viewer.

Sometimes I’ll get a word in my head, often a proper noun, that independent of meaning or context repeats:

“Armangnac… armangnac…”

“Smith and Wesson…Smith and Wesson…”


“Tommy Tune… Tommy Tune…

Rereading a collection of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, I encountered a little moment at the end of a tale that got caught the same way in my mind. And now, thinking about these gems by Sullivan, color skittering about like the fragments of sound in an Autechre song that somehow fall together into an over-arching structure, I project upon their production the same obscure logic described here:

You reasoned it out beautifully,” I exclaimed in unfeigned admiration. “It is so long a chain, and yet every link rings true.” 

“It saved me from ennui,” he answered, yawning. “Alas! I already feel it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.”

-Aaron