The North View Gallery is pleased to announce a group exhibition featuring eight mid-career artists, deeply engaged with pattern and formal repetition in the realization of visually dynamic and structurally complex works. Referencing a diverse range of strategies and conceptual preoccupations, works in the exhibition will variously touch upon the periodic structures of OP Art, utilitarian concerns of the Pattern and Decoration movement, cumulative processes of Systems Art, the politics of Cultural Identity, and spiritual aspects of symmetry among other concerns.
metaphysics
January 7, 2016
The Pull of Repetition, Portland, Oregon, 2016
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March 15, 2015
Geometry of Knowing, Part 4: YOU ARE HERE
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Geometry of Knowing, Part 4: YOU ARE HERE, March 19 – 28, 2015
Audain Gallery, 149 West Hastings St., Vancouver, BC. Hours: 12-5 PM, Tues.-Sat.
Geometry of Knowing is a group exhibition that investigates approaches to the acquisition of knowledge in the full mind-body-spirit sense of intelligence. The exhibition is a collaborative curatorial effort by students and faculty from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Specifically, Geometry of Knowing Part 4: YOU ARE HERE aims to bridge theory and practice by locating interpretations of knowledge production in the context of a pedagogical institution.
Participating artists include:
Amanda Arcuri, John Baldessari, Alison Bremner, Vanessa Brown, Chris Chapman, Sarah Davidson, Irina Giri, Jessica Gnyp, Alex Grünenfelder, Aleezay Hashmi, Danyal Imani, James K-M, Carolina Krawczyk, Jaymie Johnson, Janna Kumi, Adriana Lademann, Anchi Lin, Lucida Lab Collaborative, Sandy Margaret, T.J. Mclachlan, Bronwyn A Mcmillin, Jennifer O’Keeffe – Almond, Shelley Penfold, Terra Poirier, Emilio Rojas, Oscar A Lira Sanchez, Erin Siddall, Christian Vistan and Viki Wu.
August 11, 2013
The Pataphysical Paintings of James K-M & Synn Kune Loh
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November 2, 2012
SEFIROT: Paintings by James K-M, December 6, 2012 – January 6, 2013
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July 11, 2012
The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
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At the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut
June 26, 2012 – August 1, 2012
Doorkeeper #1 – #10
spray paint on 2″ x 2″ wood
40″ x 30″ x 1.5″ each
2012
April 12, 2012
Recent painting
Posted by James K-M under 2012, abstract, art, canada, canadian, geometric, kabbalah, metaphysics, op art, Paintings, pataphysical, pataphysics, pictograph, pictographic, primal, vancouver[2] Comments
January 5, 2011
Paleofuturity at Modern Fuel
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Jason de Haan
Lauren Hall
James K-M
Mac McArthur
Iriz Pääbo
Holly Ward
April 30 – June 4, 2011
Reception: Saturday, April 30, 7 PM
Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre | 21 A Queen St. | Kingston, Ontario
http://www.modernfuel.org/
With Paleofuturity, Modern Fuel will be filled with a group
exhibition that turns the space into a time machine transporting
viewers into the futuristic past. Or the prehistoric future? Curated
by Michael Davidge, Paleofuturity draws together artists from
across the country and from a wide a range of disciplines
including painting, sound installation, photography, video and
sculpture. The exhibition opens hypothetical spaces for the
contemplation of the effects of technology on the consciousness
of time, and, potentially, vice versa.
Left: I Opener, Locus Solus, One Hand Watches The Other
Centre: Question and Answer and Stars, Cloud 8
(Lauren Hall, upper left pyramids; Jason de Haan, floor audio installation)
Right: Self Defensive
(Lauren Hall, left; Mac McArthur, right)
Excerpt from the exhibition essay by Michael Davidge:
Although they may appear to be the least futuristic looking works in the exhibition, the paintings of James K-M were the main inspiration for this investigation of paleofuturity. With an economy of means, relatively simple geometric patterns painted with acrylics and stain on plywood, K-M has been working through permutations of a code whose implications could be apocalyptic. The paintings express a metaphysics related to the end of the Mayan calendar, which occurs at the winter solstice of 2012. The implication is that if society continues to run the same course it has taken for millennia then certainly the end for us is nigh. K-M’s paintings attempt to short-circuit any self-fulfilling prophecy by establishing new patterns for thinking that break with old identifications. K-M has described his paintings as “contemporary pictographs” that “point to a non-rational language beyond mind.” A painting like I Opener (2007), for example, not only puts forward a notion of the artistic process as perceptual and not conceptual, but also intimates that the ultimate point of reception is the annihilation of the self. K-M’s practice is certainly at odds with the reigning “Vancouver School” of thought, whose clerical photo-conceptualism is ultimately conservative. K-M finds a more kindred spirit in the work of the Canadian West Coast Hermetics, like Gregg Simpson and Gilles Foisy, who have been marginalized since the ’70s. The concise, almost rudimentary, statements made by K-M’s paintings are prolegomena to further explorations of arcane subject matter, outside of time and after the end of time. As K-M says about his painting Question and Answer and Stars (2007), “When you ask a question of the unknown you have to ask it in a way that can be understood.” The answer will invariably be a reflection of the question.
…
More than speculative fictions, the works in Paleofuturity do not simply demand a suspension of disbelief. Rather, they elicit the buoyancy of belief. Belief proffers the levitation required for an out-of-this-world experience. Whether or not the future is utopian or dystopian, it will be important to remember that salvation is usually understood to lie in something altogether other, completely foreign and outside ourselves. Threshold experiences of worlds beyond that the works in Paleofuturity evoke introduce us to the previously unknown and offer opportunities for the intense imaginings of other arrangements.
The complete exhibition essay by Michael Davidge here: Paleofuturity Essay.pdf
May 29, 2010
Baron Gallery – Group Exhibition of Contemporary Art
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BARON GALLERY
293 Columbia Street,
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6A 2R5
Group Exhibition of Contemporary Art
Featuring Vincent Dumoulin, James K-M, PEETA, Greg Swales
May 29th – July 24th, 2010
“In my paintings, cross-cultural appropriation can allude to Native beadwork, old floor tiling, post New York school abstraction or minimalism, a board game without pieces (since the work moves without them), a Navaho blanket, or Aztec or Mayan sacred geometry. These aspects represent appropriated traditions that don’t usually coexist and a collision of cultures that are somehow resonant with each other. These are metaphysical appropriations beyond the gestural and ironic and collide to reveal a sentient conscious unknown. Yet my work remains within the realm of Western abstract painting, constrained by a square piece of plywood (24″ x 24″), interacting with its stained grainy surface, superimposed by a contemporary abstract figure.”
– James K-M, 2010
Newman Ruminals (Yellow, Sienna, Black, Red, Blue)
Stain and acrylic on plywood
24″ x 24″ each, 2008 (Titles by Jasa Baka)
(Order changed during show to: Sienna, Black, Red, Blue, Yellow)
January 2, 2010
The Artist Magicians (Los Artistas Magos) in Camagüey, Cuba
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THE ARTIST MAGICIANS (LOS ARTISTAS MAGOS)
James K-M (Canada), Joel Jover Llenderrosos (Cuba), Osmany Soler Mena (Cuba)
December 18, 2009 – January 18, 2010
Centro Provincial de Artes Plásticas, Camagüey, Cuba
Curated and catalogue essay by Pavel Alejandro Barrios Sosa
The Artist Magicians essay.pdf
“The Artist Magicians form a human conscience, revealing universes that are concentric or chaotic, silent or resounding; they are devotees whose occupation is to reveal or to make possible things that have never been, things that will be, or things that will continue to be. The primordial magic art has not changed; the change is only in our way of perceiving. That limitation in perception leads to tedium and confusion until the evidence is accepted. The magic is there still, with the same simplicity which Benedetto Grocce indicated when he stated that the search for art is to look for a concept that everybody knows. The search for art is not necessary, it is self-evident. It is simply not understood that it is understood.”
~ Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue essay by Pavel Alejandro Barrios Sosa
All works by James K-M are acrylic on paper, 24″ x 24″, 2009
The Artist Magicians (collaboration), acrylic on canvas, 52 3/4″ x 91 1/8″, 2009
The task is to give birth to the old in a new time. ~ C.G. Jung
A proposition must communicate a new sense with old words. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
That which is oldest is most young and most new. There is nothing so ancient and so dead as human novelty. The “latest” is always stillborn. What is really new is what was there all the time. ~ Thomas Merton, Zen and Birds of Appetite
Layering the open, light-emitting heart, day and night, the conscious and unconscious, upon the unevolved, as a creative act. ~ James K-M, 2010
July 23, 2009
Mural in the Strathearn Neighbourhood of Edmonton, Alberta
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The mural by Vancouver artist James K-M is entitled Free Rain and is 16 ft. x 16 ft. It was unveiled on July 19, 2009 in Edmonton, Alberta, at 9206 95th Avenue (west wall). It was commissioned by Joe Clare, Edmonton realtor, patron of the arts and humanity.
Please visit the project web site at http://www.strathearnmural.net/.