Morgan Lehman Gallery is very pleased to present an exhibition of two Brooklyn-based artists, painter JJ Miyaoka-Pakola and sculptor Matthew J. Stone.
Miyaoka-Pakola’s paintings present us with complex color networks, intricately organized by linear structures. These swirling, hard-edge geometries are, interestingly, derived from language. In each work, Miyaoka-Pakola begins with a phrase taken from our lexicon of tech-speak, (FYEO: "For Your Eyes Only", e.g.) and renders the words in free-wheeling, often barely discernible script on the canvas. Using this drawing framework as a jumping-off point, the artist then laboriously applies acrylic and urethane paint in opaque swaths and sweeping, pointillist fields that seem to float forward, recede, and shimmer before our eyes. Looking at these paintings asks us to simultaneously ascribe meaning to what we see and to question the nature of meaning-making itself.
Stone is also interested in using systems to create visual experience and the delivery of color via structure, but eschews the pictorial for the dimensional. Deploying computer-generated forms and direct burn-out bronze casting techniques, Stone brings a handmade, materially-diverse touch to what is ostensibly high-tech sculpture. These works offer a panoply of textures and surfaces to enjoy, and come to life through the interplay of repeated forms and the inherent (perhaps pre-programmed) breakdown of those systems of organization. The results feel both alien and human, mechanical and almost anachronistically analog, and resemble artifacts of another stage (future or past) of humankind’s development.
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