Counter Nature 3, 2011
Sabina Lee Gallery
Los Angeles, CA
April 9 - May 14, 2011
Accompanying this last part of the Counter Nature series is a catalog encompassing
all three parts of the series, published by Margaret Thatcher Projects, Toomey Tourell Fine
Art, and Sabina Lee Gallery, with an
essay by Patricia C. Phillips.
Landscape images, in packaging the experience of nature, deactivate our looking and respond
to our anticipated experience of the landscape as an image. Counter Nature 3 is the third
part in a series of attempts to reconcile differences in the experience of nature and its
image. Following the notion of landscape as a culturally determined designation, the viewer
is asked to take part in the reconstruction of these landscapes in an indeterminate space,
where both the elements of the landscape and picture plane itself are in play, simultaneously
projecting toward and receding away from the viewer. Whereas the previous series emphasized
the motion nascent in the landscape images of park-like settings, Counter Nature 3 focuses on
the moment of happenstance created upon encountering a crowd prior to knowing the exact nature
of the event. While continuing the earlier method of reverse painting on sheets of transparent
plastic, the relentless attention to the foreground in the series of four paintings, CN3-1
through CN3-4, created by both the negation of middle and background and the heightened
treatment and awareness of its details, extends the moment into a state where the act of
watchful waiting becomes the valid event and reason for the image and its experience. The
exhibition also includes a wall installation of paintings detailing views of CN3-1 along with
photo-transferred acrylic cubes that articulate the event through a process of folding, and
a set of twelve cubes arranged like a game of block puzzle, whose composite image reveals the
nature of the event of the series' paintings.
In the catalog essay, Patricia C. Phillips writes of this series: "Through an orchestration of
a shallow, spaceless depth of field with an intensification of brilliant colors in brittle
fragments, Park engenders heterotopic landscapes and public spaces that are vividly imaginative
and undeniably real. Deploying both the expectations of painting with a perceived objectivity
of contemporary visual tools, Park creates succinct, compelling images of constitutive
dislocation -- representations of a sublimity dynamically reconfigured in the increasingly
contested spaces of nature, culture, and technology."
