Current Show    |     Future Shows    |     Past Shows    |     Box Sets Gridlock John Lyon, Christine Morla,and Jeremy Kidd Augusta Wood in Project Room Emilio Garcia Plascencia in North Gallery Opening: Saturday June 4, 7-10pm Exhibition Runs: June 4 – 25, 2005 John Lyon Christine Morla   Jeremy Kidd     Augusta Wood Emilio Garcia Plascencia Gridlock: Featuring John Lyon, Christine Morla, Jonathan Parsons and Jeremy Kidd leaving a kind of arrival: Work by Augusta Wood Non Excess Baggage: Work by Emilio Garcia Plascencia GRIDLOCK: an exhibition of contemporary manifestations of the grid. Rather like a ghost at the feast high modernism's regular grid is a hovering presence in all of the included works. But, if the modernist grid was a eulogy to flatness that simultaneously asserted some stable (if chilly) universal structure, then these works propose a more complex configuration of coordinates. Here right angles often wilt, spaces bulge like so many well-fed stomachs and horizons multiply. Having invited the specter to sit down and talk, Kidd, Lyon and Morla engage in a trio of cross-referencing conversations with the old ghost that are by turns pithy, analytical, flirtatious and challenging. JEREMY KIDD asserts that, far from being adaptive, 'natural forces' are reactive and expressive and they reveal themselves as aberrations in the regular surface patterns of our built and grown environments. In the context of Gridlock his digitally-manipulated photographs of architectural facades propose a universal intelligence which, contrary to the supposedly disinterested force represented by the grid, is at once quixotic and desiring. Kidd's extensive national and international exhibition record includes UFO at the University of Colorado Springs, Pop Surrealism at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, CT; and shows at the Laguna Art Museum, CA; Littlejohn Contemporary, NY; and the Caroline Wiseman Gallery, London. Inspired by the clan history of Scotland and the distinctive tartans that designate each familial grouping, JOHN LYON'S rich plaid paintings take on the grid as both functional entity and narrative structure. At the same time, by distorting the plaid and curving its regimented lines, he causes the space between the lines to swell. That which familiarity indicates should be flat – the tartan pattern – and that which is known to be flat - the painted surface – begin to undulate under the influence of illusion. A recent graduate of Claremont Graduate School, Lyon has shown his work at the Rhode Island School of Design, Chicago's Labotomy Gallery and Concrete Walls in Los Angeles. Referencing traditional crafts and children's pastimes CHRISTINE MORLA'S vibrantly-colored woven paper and palm fronds 'mats' are pinned, taped and glued to the wall. Creating a first impression of over-spilling abundance the paper edges curl off the walls, but underlying the playful profusion is a rigorous structure of warp and weft and a sophisticated and highly selective approach to pattern and color. Morla's work has been presented at venues that include Crazy Space Gallery, Highways Performance Space and Patricia Correia Gallery in Santa Monica; the Armory Northwest in Pasadena and Art Frankfurt, Germany. In AUGUSTA WOOD's photographs of for-now-unpeopled places words are inscribed into snow and chalked on sidewalks. One text, spelled out at knee height in magnets on a fridge door, reads 'I'll be alright, but thank you'. In another toothpaste smeared on a bathroom mirror states 'the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits'. Embedded in Wood's elegant images, which are redolent of Sunday evening reverie, the texts sometimes suggest themselves as thoughts that have been left and lost, sometimes as injunctions whose meanings are rendered both sharp and elusive by an aphoristic poetry. Current Raid Artist In Residence EMILIO GARCIA PLASCENCIA is a sculptor from Mexico whose current body of work is titled 'Non Excess Baggage'. At once skeletal and fulsomely pod-like Garcia's forms emerge from the artist's experience that, in a peripatetic life, all but the essentials must be shed. Emilio Garcia has previously been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center.