In the Shadow of Numbers: Charles Gaines Selected Works from 1975-2012, represents a significant overview of the artist’s work to date and brings together specific moments from the last three decades of his artistic career. Including work from the Explosion, Randomized Text: History of Stars, Night/Crimes, Shadows, and Walnut Tree Orchard series, the exhibition unfolds over two campuses and is the first in what we hope will be many collaborative projects between the Pomona College Museum of Art and Pitzer Art Galleries, Pitzer College.
Over the past forty years, Charles Gaines has investigated the relationships between aesthetic experience, political beliefs, and the formation of meaning, employing systems and rule-based procedures to explore how we experience and derive meaning from images, language, and art. Often linked with early Conceptualists who came to prominence in the 1960s, Gaines developed a practice that focuses on issues of subjectivity, as well as traditional formal and material concerns. His identification with John Cage’s examinations of indeterminacy may be seen in his use of metaphors, metonyms, and other linguistic tools.
On view at the Pomona College Museum of Art are several works that bridge the sublime and the documentary, in which night sky imagery is combined with texts or found photographs. The 1994-1995 Night/Crimes series—representing the first of Gaines’s “Disaster Narratives”—explores how emotions can be manipulated by unsettling and traumatic images. A constellation of stars is placed below a photograph of a convicted white man and unrelated murder crime scene, and separated by text identifying the location of both the murder and particular portion of sky. Hinting at the constructed nature of meaning in our society, Gaines provides no further clues; instead he prompts us to solve the “murder mystery” ourselves by finding non-existent connections between the two representations. For the Randomized Text: History of Stars work (2006-08), Gaines pairs photographs of the night sky with textual drawings of randomly-sequenced sentences from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and Edward Said’s Orientalism. While the combination radically dislocates and transforms both the texts and the sky images, multiple connections surface, demonstrating the incessant drive to find meaning in the most ambiguous situations.
Skybox I (2011), a large-scale sculptural installation, is a twelve-foot-long light box with photographs of four political texts on its surface. Spanning three hundred years and several continents, these texts combine to present a complex global perspective ranging from oppression and colonization to liberty, democracy, and freedom. As with much of Gaines’s work, Skybox I juxtaposes text with image, which in this case is revealed at regular intervals when the gallery lights dim, making visible LED lights that shine through thousands of laser-cut holes on the sculpture’s surface. The configuration of text and image and the arbitrary nature of their pairing generate connections and unanticipated meanings that encourage a nuanced understanding of the world reflected around us.
Gaines’s series of triptychs, Walnut Tree Orchard (1975-2012), each comprising three panels, links the artist’s works installed at the Pomona College Museum of Art with those on view 1,000 yards away at Pitzer Art Galleries. On display at Pitzer is the fourth and most recent iteration of this larger body of work. The remainder of the series, which as a whole spans thirty-seven years of the artist’s practice, is on display at Pomona. Each triptych consists of a photograph of a solitary walnut tree, leafless and skeletal, followed by two drawings—the first of which traces the image of the tree while the other plots the shape of the tree in numbers. The series is realized as each set charts the previous drawings and photographs of trees using a numerical system. The resulting sequence reflects the aggregate of images methodically recorded over a long period of time while simultaneously conjuring the idea of a healthy orchard that, like this generative project, could endlessly propagate. Equally productive and expandable, Gaines’s Shadows works (1978-1980) uses four panels instead of three—two photographs and two numerically plotted drawings—to map the silhouette of a potted-plant and its shadow turned at intervals of 90 degrees and systematically tracked over the subsequent polyptychs.
Despite Gaines’s rigorous conceptualism, mysterious and emotive elements subtly prevail and intentionally rupture the purity of his formal system. This is clearly visible in the Explosion series (2006-2008). These diptychs feature large-scale drawings of mysterious explosions, painstakingly rendered in pencil, paired with small, framed panels of text that phlegmatically describe various uprisings against extraordinarily cruel imperialist and colonialist powers throughout history. Similarly, Black Ghost Blues Redux (2008), the sole video work in the show, articulates the experience of an oppressed group transcribed through the musical form of another subjugated culture; in this case, a young Korean woman singing the Lightnin’ Hopkins’s blues song, Black Ghost Blues. The emotive rendering endows the lyrics with a universal anguish.
While Gaines emphasizes that the pairings he makes are arbitrary, contemplating the work generates previously unthinkable possibilities and encourages us to construct meaning in unusually complex, sometimes deeply stirring, conditions. Ultimately, this brush with the awe inspiring, whether in considering the sublimity of the universe or the mysteries of death, challenges us to construct a new understanding of what constitutes the rational and the irrational, the logical and the absurd, the everyday and the spectacular.
The exhibition of Charles Gaines’s work is the forty-third in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series and the nineteenth exhibition at Pitzer Art Galleries, Pitzer College. Pomona’s Project Series, an ongoing program of focused exhibitions of work by Southern California artists, has always relied on the good will and generous support of many individuals and groups, in particular, longtime supporters the Pasadena Art Alliance.
Rebecca McGrew
Senior Curator, Pomona College Museum of Art
Ciara Ennis
Director/Curator, Pitzer Art Galleries, Pitzer College