Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present Magic Mountain, a group exhibition featuring new works by Montreal-based painter Pardiss Amerian and New York-based artists Hannah Celli and Coco Young. Named after Thomas Mann’s novel, the exhibition explores themes of healing, the transformative powers of faraway places, and the dissolution of time. Through histories of the self, arts and literature, the works in the show open up pathways into distant worlds, where the eye can travel between the past and the present.
Coco Young’s paintings of arcane and romantic sceneries bring to mind post-impressionist styles of Synthetists, Nabis, and Symbolists. The thin layering of vibrant colors lends the paintings depth and gives the mind space to wander off into wide horizons, ancient ruins and idyllic landscapes. Loose literary and art historical references are paired with memories and personal relationships that create a unique language in which dreamscapes of color hold spirits of distant lands and unknown times.
Points of departure for Pardiss Amerian’s paintings are Persian literary prose and manuscripts of the 14th and 15th century. By embedding fragments of personage, poems and stories into multiple textual and visual layers, Amerian explores new methods of image making. By accumulating multiple layers of paint, frequently applied through processes that embody touch, she immerses herself in the stories she depicts, creating spaces to wander and heal in. In fracturing and reassembling time periods and narratives, combining history with her own personal experiences and inventions in the process of painting, the narrative dissolves into the many facets of the image. What crystallizes is a feeling that emerges in between the lines and layers, and lingers throughout the passage of time.
Hannah Celli’s series of sculptures, Organ Players, consists of a group of carved stones of inner organs and body parts. In a laborious process of uncovering the sculpture through a repetitive rhythm of breaking stone, it reflects a process of turning inwards, guided by a personal history of endurance, patience, time and strength. Like an enigma, the individual sculptures give clues to the body as a whole: while its disconnection suggestsillness and isolation, the care each work has been given mimics the process of healing. Displayed on aluminum and steel pedestals, engraved with titles and descriptions, the body fragments reference reliquaries and burials that speak to the fear of mortality, and the contradictions and transformations held within each of us.
For more information, please contact Silke Lindner-Sutti at silke@jackhanley.com