Spirit Resonance
Spirit Resonance: The Vitality of Printmaking
McNichols Civic Center Building
144 West Colfax Avenue, Denver, CO 80202
January 18-April 5, 2020 (View an online gallery of the exhibition here)
Curator: Sarah Magnatta
Admission: Free
Review by Srishti Sankaranarayanan
The McNichols Civic Center Building recently unveiled a new exhibition titled Spirit Resonance: The Vitality of Printmaking in the Boettcher Cultural Pavilion on the second floor. Guest curated by Sarah Magnatta, the exhibit celebrates the medium of printmaking and features six artists who channel their energy to create poignant, primarily abstract works. The artists—Taiko Chandler, Catherine Chauvin, Marie-Dolma Chophel, Angela Craven, Jade Hoyer, and Sangeeta Reddy—use collagraphy, lithography, monotypes, and screenprinting to open up a personal conversation with viewers through evocations of nature, language, and the emotion of color, form, and design.
“Spirit resonance” (alternatively known as “spirit consonance”) is one of the six principles proposed by Xie He—a sixth century critic from China—when describing the fundamental characteristics of a good Chinese ink-based painting. Spirit resonance is generally understood as the transfer of the artist’s Qi or energy to the artwork, thereby animating it for the beholder. [1]
While the work should exhibit the artist’s vitality, Xie He asserts, it should also display the artist’s innate talent to provide a formal likeness to a natural thought. For Xie He, this indescribable vitality forms the essence of the artwork without which “there is no need to look further.” [2] Although formal likeness may not be achievable in abstract works, the exhibition at the McNichols Building seeks to apply Xie He’s principle to connect abstraction in printmaking with this artistic vitality and to engage viewers in the process.
Installation view of the exhibition Spirit Resonance: The Vitality of Printmaking at the McNichols Civic Center Building. Image by DARIA.
As one enters the sweeping gallery space, the works seem at first hidden by the rooms’ large pillars. But upon closer inspection the artists’ respective niches become apparent and the harmonious transitions and connections between the different sections are striking.
Taiko Chandler, Nightfall #5, monoprint, 26 x 22 inches, 2017. Image courtesy of Taiko Chandler.
Taiko Chandler’s Nightfall #5 stands out for its delicate, layered abstraction. A maze of white-lined shapes overlap undulating, colorful, almost botanical patterns that float on a ground that resembles the night sky. Through its distinct language of lines and forms the work seems to convey the complexity of thought and perhaps even our dreaming life at night.
Catherine Chauvin, Legacy: Hopes and Fears, a grouping of 9 panels of lithography, relief printing, monotypes, trace monotypes, screenprinting, digital images, powder dusting, chine collé, and hand coloring, 45 x 80 inches (overall), 2019. Image by DARIA.
Catherine Chauvin’s Legacy: Hopes and Fears series opposite of Chandler’s work employs somewhat representational images including rocks, knots, and fences depicted in neutral colors and gestural lines. Chauvin draws on the viewer’s familiarity with these objects as a starting point for her exploration into their light and dark connotations. As she explains in her statement: “The net elements may be capturing something as fleeting as a thought, or a cloud, or allowing something to escape. That some folks see the nets and fences as boundaries and borders interests me, too.”
Sangeeta Reddy, Ellipse #37, collage/mixed media on monotype, 22 x 30 inches, 2012. Image by DARIA.
Similar to Chauvin’s approach, in Sangeeta Reddy’s mixed-media collages on monotypes such as Ellipse #37 the artist uses muted tones and deconstructed shapes, but based on Devanagari script—the writing used for Sanskrit and Hindi—that evoke different meanings depending on the viewer’s familiarity with the script. This is also the language of the chants that Reddy recites during her art-making process. [3] Knowing this aspect of her working method personalizes her prints, connecting us to her meditative state during their creation.
Jade Hoyer, Josephine 1, silkscreen 2019. Image by DARIA.
Jade Hoyer’s geometric, floral silkscreen prints like Josephine 1 are bold and graphic, offering a nice contrast to Angela Craven’s botanical Depth of Winter series whose cool shades of blue and mauve are suggestive of cold weather. Marie-Dolma Chophel’s lithographic prints also evoke the natural world, with abstract patterns and linework suggestive of landscapes and scenery with mountains, grass, and rivers. Chophel’s Natural Disorders print demonstrates her interest in “the in-between” of representation and abstraction with its swirling colors reminiscent of oceans waves or mountains but with hatched lines and washes that defy naturalistic categorization. [4]
Marie-Dolma Chophel, Natural Disorders, original lithograph on Rives paper, from a limited edition of 50, signed and stamped “Atelier Clot Paris,” 8 x 24.5 inches, 2017. Photograph by Srishti Sankaranarayanan.
Using abstraction and abstracted imagery presented in a variety of printmaking processes, each artist in Spirit Resonance: The Vitality of Printmaking is able to forge a particular association with Xie He’s first principle of spirit resonance. Setting the stage for Denver’s Month of Printmaking in March, this exhibition provides a unique perspective on understanding the transcendental effect of abstraction in contemporary printmaking.
Srishti Sankaranarayanan holds a Masters of Arts in Art History from the University of Denver. While focusing principally on the politics of religious spaces in medieval Asia in her research, she also has an affinity for the expression of the personal in modern and contemporary art.
[1] The phrase Xie He uses to describe spirit resonance is “Qi Yun Shen Dong.” Scholars translate the phrase as either “spirit resonance” or “spirit consonance.” See Xiaoyan Hu, “The Nature of ‘Qi Yun’ (Spirit Consonance) in Chinese Painting,” Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, Volume 8 (2016): 266.
[2] From a conversation with guest curator Sarah Magnatta and from the exhibition notes at the McNichols Civic Center Building, available here: http://www.mcnicholsbuilding.com/exhibitions/detail/spirit-resonance.
[3] As mentioned in Sangeeta Reddy’s artist statement in the exhibition.
[4] The notion of “in-between” is per Marie-Dolma Chophel’s artist statement in the exhibition.
