Jim Malone:
The Boarder Land

Fall Gallery Night
Saturday, September 11, 2010
2 - 9 pm

Exhibition will be on display through
October 20 30, 2010

The Universal Particular: Drawings by James Malone

"Sometimes a rock is just a rock, or a place just a place. Sometimes these things transcend the ordinary. I use my drawings to sort these out."

Somewhere between the universal and the particular, the transcendent and the immanent, is a space that is charted in James Malone's drawings. Like maps that render the material world in abstract terms, but at the same time turn ideas into physical things, Malone's pictures of mesas and cactus flowers, celestial constellations and the courses of rivers, represent their subject matter, represent themselves, and, ultimately, simply are themselves.

Malone draws expansive pictures and also creates minutely detailed close-ups; he may fill a sheet with marks extending in every direction, or leave vast areas of bare paper, traversed only by a length of kinked wire. He gives viewers innumerable ways of receiving his work. In addition to his Big Bend landscapes and celestial images, he has drawn people, signs and texts, knotted rope or string (an allusion to String Theory), dirt, rocks, running horses, and running water. There is a feeling of openness and countless possibilities, and the sense that anything and everything has the potential to be worthy of thoughtful attention.

He's a tactile artist. He works on paper because it presents him with a hard surface that doesn't give under the pressure of pen, graphite pencil, or oil stick, and allows strokes of fluid, water-based media to obtain form. At the same time, sturdy cotton-rag paper can be burned, stamped, and perforated, and it can support wire or thread; this allows other, less conventional kinds of marks to be made on it and into it.

The rough and forceful, yet minutely observed, graphite marks used to realize the surfaces of, say, an immense boulder, allow viewers to understand the weight and density of solid stone. The vital force of countless, small gestures used to define that boulder also animate its representation to a point that it seems on the verge of visual dissolution: it's as if we could see components of the stone's molecules in motion and could see through its apparent solidity.

Yet, as important as materiality is for Malone, and as meaningful as the contact between hand-held medium and actual surface is, the conceptual is of at least equal importance. The material and particular embody their own ideas, under the artist's hand and before the viewer's eyes. They represent larger and smaller things, such as the courses of rivers and the human circulatory system. But they also illustrate concepts that are bigger, and potentially link such phenomena as the flow of water and the flow of blood.

Malone isn't telling anyone to accept any such linkage as fact. He's not explaining anything. He is positing ideas whose processing generates individual, existential meaning. He's allowing viewers their own experiences on their own terms. This is the kind of generosity that opens the door to joy.
-Janet Tyson