Featuring Tatyana Ostapenko, Nicolas Norman, Thomas Putman, Chacha Sands and Julie Webb.
August 16 – 31, 2013
Gallery Hours: Friday – Sunday, 12:00 – 5:00 pm and by appointment
Opening Reception: Friday, August 16 from 6:00 – 9:00 pm
Nisus Gallery: 8371 N Interstate, Studio 1, Portland, OR
Nisus Gallery is pleased to present Fuzzy Logic.
“In fuzzy logic, exact reasoning is viewed as a limiting case of approximate reasoning.
In fuzzy logic, everything is a matter of degree.
Any logical system can be fuzzified.”
— Fuzzy Sets, Fuzzy Logic, and Fuzzy Systems: Selected Papers by Lotfi A. Zadeh
The works in “Fuzzy Logic” were produced in ten weeks by five artists –Nicholas Norman, Tatyana Ostapenko, Thomas Putman, Chacha Sands, and Julie Webb–each responsible for producing 50 paintings. This idea to produce so much in so little time, essentially a painting per workday, was the main prompt of an advanced painting class, The 50 Works Project, that had been taught for over twenty-five years by Susan Harlan in the School of Art + Design at Portland State University. Though the class was no longer offered, these five students independently found a willing mentor at PSU, Painting Instructor Tia Factor, to guide them through the process.
The five artists worked closely together in a classroom studio environment, and although each painting was produced by an individual in his or her own style and voice, the ideas behind the paintings relate directly back to the collective. There is a dialogue between the works; two paintings by two different artists may communicate closer than two by the same person. This blurring of authorship parallels the experience of working in a shared studio space: deadlines, days, times and mediums became just as responsible for the ideas in the paintings as the experiences of the artists.
The sense of Incompleteness is evident — a subject? — in many of the paintings, and the question “Is it finished?” was asked between the artists repeatedly. A layered brushy section with no apparent representation, or an abruptly contrasting space that was at first overlooked are sometimes the most appealing part of the works. By seeking a balance between underdevelopment and control, they intend to pose unanswerable questions about what makes a painting “good”, but mostly to make something interesting to the painter’s eye.
There are no absolutes in “Fuzzy Logic.”
