taking shape
Featuring: Matt Demers, Keri Kimura and Thomas Stenquist
Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form. - Salman Rushdie
Taking Shape explores different manners of creating form through the work of three artists: Matt Demers, Keri Kimura, and Thomas Stenquist. Demers conjures form through color, emphasizing line through association rather than delineation. Kimura focuses on distilling a multi-dimensional space into a two dimensional surface, quilting a transient moment onto a static surface. Stenquist, on the other hand, works in three dimensions, starting with a single piece of metal to create beautifully complex spaces marked by flowing, elegant lines.
Matt Demers: Matt Demers is a visual artist living and working in Gardiner, Maine. A quiet person, Demers closely observes the fevered and cross-talking world, absorbing and collecting its art and ephemera, and learning or imagining the meanings that odd objects, forgotten texts, and torn treasures carry with them. Demers is or has been an art and antiques collector, sign maker, gravedigger, embroiderer, antiques dealer, and graphic artist; those experiences shape the various techniques and media that make their way into his paintings. He is drawn to the misfiled and overlooked fragments of the past and the ways they might shine if rightly considered. Demers’ paintings are abstract, and include media like acrylic, spray paint, house paint, and collaged ephemera. Drawing is critical to his artistic practice. His drawings on post-its, the backs of work orders or on vintage writing pads fill his studio and notebooks, forming a loose index of observations and ideas about them. Demers’ abstract, mixed-media paintings accordingly emphasize line, yet rather than delineate, Demers’ line tangles forms and associations within each other, suggesting the all-at-onceness of careworn antiques, Charlie Brown, graffiti, medieval armor, Instagram, floral wallpaper, and music. Demers’ paintings are about everything at once, snagged and stacked over the surface, the very pile-up of contemporary life, and the way it feels to think about it all together.
Keri Kimura: “Growing up, the women in my family could sew anything. Clothing, quilts, costumes, things with pockets, things with feathers. I was more interested in paint than fabric but I’ve come to recognize the similarity in these practices. In my paintings, I collect colors, shapes, shadows, patterns. I assemble them and weave them together, move them around, search for the places they resonate, like quilts made of pigment. It’s a process rooted in intuition.
When you cut out the shape of a sleeve to sew a shirt, it isn’t shaped like an arm. It has flat sides and gentle curves. But there’s a sense that it mimics the body, like a geometric shorthand. For me, painting is a kind of shorthand too. A way to put a multi-dimensional moment in time into the flatness and stillness of the picture plane. What I want from painting is to distill my experience into a language that carries in it both an ode to the women of my past and a space that I hold for the transient moment I inhabit.”
Thomas Stenquist: “Art making is an intimate act and a creative expression of accumulated experiences, observations, thoughts, and feelings. For the past 15 years, I’ve been pursuing a process of working a single piece of metal, which is usually purchased from scrap yards: old brass drains, copper plumbing pipe, discarded stainless steel countertops, and old horse trailers. The metal is prepared by cutting and flattening into a square or rectangular flat sheet, with the initial cutting, hammering and filing of edge. This preparation establishes an intimacy between the material and myself. What follows is a series of choices, cutting, bending, twisting, and hammering. There are no welds or rivets, a single sheet of metal flows throughout the sculpture. Shifting between rhythms of action and contemplation, conscious choices combined with blunders reflect images, sensations, memories, and shadows of dreams. Because I tend to work intuitively, the naming follows and emerges from the process of unifying these sensations. Choices made about a base, the grounding element, color, shape, proportion and the technique for connecting the sculpture to the base are the finalizing part of the process.”
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