EVERY OTHER MOMENT: STEPHEN KASNER AND CHARLES SHERMAN

Los Angeles, January 2004— BLK/MRKT Gallery presents Every Other Moment, an exhibition combining the paintings of Stephen Kasner and sculpture by Charles Sherman. The show opens with an artist’s reception on the evening of January 8th and will continue through February 26th, 2005.

Stephen Kasner’s paintings operate in between the worlds of spirit and flesh. Working in a large scale and an earthy palette dominated by black and white, his mainly abstract images move the eye using form, texture and an elusive, vaguely hallucinatory optical dynamism. Despite the subtlety of the symbolic images that do sometimes appear, these paintings are essentially emotional and psychological landscapes. Great inky clouds accumulate above shadowy places, and Kasner’s technique itself invites comparison with naturally occurring patterns like lichen, fossilizations, and the leavings of dried-up tide pools. They share a weighty sense of absence, piquing curiosity as to what has or is about to happen there, and their size ineluctably involve the viewer’s body in the unfolding events.

This is a haunting paradox that motivates the work: it has the force of compelling representation, but that which it represents is ethereal in nature. On a broader level, the work’s subject is Life itself—the everlasting, impenetrable, uncontrollable patterns and cycles of Nature and the human
soul. He believes that symbols and ideas have the power to create balance and harmony between the competing desires of the human mind. The paintings move back and forth between acting as meditative focal points for the viewer and sincere attempts to portray the universal continuum of beauty evident in the cycle of life.

The intersection between spirit and form is a primary factor in the work of sculptor Charles Sherman as well, though the two artists could not have more diverse techniques. Sherman’s ceramic objects are both earth-bound and ethereal. Like Kasner, Sherman is concerned with the energetic implications of imagery, the psychological resonance of pictures, objects and materials, and the eternal double helix of life and art. Where Kasner’s paintings are diaphanous and spell-binding, Sherman’s sculptures are tactile and careworn like leather wine skins, mathematical and organic like bent machine gears from the Stone Age, resolved and inscrutable like impossible to solve magic tricks. They—the Sherman Rings—are partially inspired by 19th-century German mathematician A.F. Moebius’s continuum of planes, the same formulation of the reversing-planar structure on which Escher based his most famous drawings. Each is a three- or four-sided twisted ring whose planar surfaces are continuous, having neither beginning nor end, inside nor outside. Each one seems to be a heavy optical illusion whose surfaces and architectural mysteries invite—no, require—the sense of touch in order to fully comprehend them.

In the service of furthering this ongoing investigation, he has developed a revolutionary proprietary technique for producing hollow rings to work with. This is a sort of Holy Grail in certain quarters, heretofore never consistently successful, and definitively unprecedented on the enormous scale of many of Sherman’s pieces. His larger sequential hollow-ring pieces are feats of technique, in which each of the ten or so components measures exactly twice the mass of the one in front and half of the one behind. These can be arranged at the curator’s or owner’s discretion, but tend to be most effective when spaced a few inches apart and a tunnel is formed through them, full of diffuse light and exaggerated perspective. His smaller single rings or hand-held interlocking stacked ring sculptures are a little more playful, while still retaining the absorbing character of the major works. Partly due to their more intimate scale, they encourage the same caress, but with more of a sense of direct experimentation. Again, the works’ ability to be rearranged represents a continuation of the artist’s impulses into the world of the viewer.

Despite the high-level mathematics that inspired the forms, Sherman works from instinct, employing neither calculator, nor ruler nor extruder. It’s an aesthetic proportionality that Sherman has internalized so profoundly that he does not require technology, nor does he have an interest in artificial perfection. “I have no desire to make art or beauty. I aspire in work and life to deeper levels of truth through art as meditation.” Yet his ceramic sculptures radiate a harmonious sensuality that transcends even the most classically satisfying geometry. The formal, compositional evocation of infinity also expresses the spiritual dimension of the work, a level of
meaning Sherman retains from Moebius but interprets for his modern audiences as well as for
himself. The result is a radical mix of a traditional, ancient medium with a contemporary sensibility that still references the rawness of the earth being worked, the rocks from which the clay descended. It is both beautiful and true.


BLK/MRKT Gallery was established in 2001 with an emphasis on urban contemporary art and has become a premier Los Angeles destination for established and up-and-coming artists and enthusiasts alike. Previous exhibitions have included Jeff Soto, Ryan McGinness, Evan Hecox, David Choe, WK Interact and Maya Hayuk. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday 11-6pm. BLK/MRKT Gallery

For more information, or to schedule a private viewing with the artists, please contact:
Jana DesForges at 310 837 1989 or by email