Full Gorge
Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles
May 13–June 24, 2017
Declaiming Waters none may dread --
But Waters that are still
Are so for that most fatal cause
In Nature -- they are full--
-- Emily Dickinson
Visitor Welcome Center presents Full Gorge, a solo exhibition of new work by Pearl C. Hsiung.
Hsiung's paintings invoke landscapes formed by gigantic pressures within the earth’s crust. Often times, depending on the process of plate tectonics, parts of streams and rivers form waterfalls, which over time, erode rock layers and collapse river beds, thereby creating a gorge. Her painting process mimics the entropic activities of natural erosion and geological uplifts that drastically alter land matter. For instance, paint is smeared and dragged vertically exploding the visible horizon, color gradients hint at the transformative possibilities within crevices, flattened surfaces reorient the geological order of a natural artifice. Hsiung's painted metamorphoses reference the geological and situates it within the bodily. For Hsiung, gorges are also sites of swallowing, purging, and crying, processes that are deeply dependent on one's own catharsis. The result is raw. Here, the landscapes implode into the immersive, flooding and devouring our senses.
Photo credit: Ruben Diaz