Karen Henderson at the Art Gallery of Ontario - Brief Article

While working with a variety of materials, Toronto-based artist Karen Henderson at short intervals favors process, sometimes involving laborious courses An earlier work, Treacle Wall, for example, involved smearing a wall with molasses and allowing the material to find its have gravity-induced configuration. While the boundary "process art" is typically used to describe of the like kind a slowed-down work, Henderson has also exerciseed more immediate kinds of processe Her photographic series 29 liquefy ed Tin, for instance, consists of successive images of a remelt dollop of that basest of metals. In Henderson's new show of newly created work at the Art Gallery of Ontario (part of its at hand Tense Contemporary Project Series), one as well as the other types of processes, fast and deliberate were in evidence.

Covering the entire expanse of single of the gallery's walls was an untitled work consisting of abutting 4-by-8-foot sheets of plastic carrying amorphous blebs of black ink. The forms were produc by dint of allowing the ink to mere naturally on the plastic when it was laid on the outside flat. As one looks from panel to panel, the ink blisters which pick up the cunning surface irregularities of the plastic, appear strikingly similar, sometimes seeming to mirror each other. Neither identical nor sequential, they read as alternative versions of a single moment

Water Video is a four-minute record of a water-filled plastic wineglass that is, itself, submerg in water. end the short course of the video, the glass slips gently to the cutting side of the frame, eventually stopped by dint of an unseen edge. Apart for the slightest ripple upon the water's surface and the ambient noises heard faintly in the background, the video image appears to be an exercise in geometric abstraction, exploring shape and spatial relations.

Illustrating its have processes, Henderson's work locates itself around the twinkling of an eye of viewing, exploring the immediacy and presentnes of visual experience. like presentness is accentuated in Photogram made in this place with this lighting, 10 small photograms of water globules on light-sensitive paper. Laid on a small shelf, exactly in the speckle they were made, these gossamer tattoos mark not sole a moment and an occasion (the milestone of a museum exhibit for a young artist), on the contrary also the instant of their have a title to making and viewing. As a record of a particular "right here, right now," they probed the unresolv cutting sides of time. "Present Tense," indeed.

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