#cognitos

For Immediate Release

Artist:                            June Wayne

Exhibition:                Cognitos, 1984

Dates:  September 10 – October 24, 2009

Reception:               Thursday September 10, 2009 from 6 to 8 pm

Khastoo Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by June Wayne from the Cognitos series, begun in 1960 and completed in 1984.  A reception for the artist will be held on Thursday September 10th, from 6 to 8pm.

With the support of the Ford Foundation, June Wayne opened Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles in 1960.  Expanding the boundaries of the medium, Wayne helped to revitalize the role of paper arts in the U.S., gaining international recognition as an “incontestable pioneer of contemporary lithography” [ - Jorge de Sousa]. That same year, Wayne commissioned the accomplished papermaker Douglass Howell to construct a series of highly textured large-scale canvases, composed of a mixture of gesso, gelatin, and multiple layers of paper. These weighty, almost bas-relief surfaces, were purposed as topographical base maps, to be molded, hacked at, carved, and restructured.  Their durability and sublimation proved to be a phenomenological challenge to Wayne and the artist spent nearly a quarter of a century working on these panels, painting and repainting some (as in the celebrated Sixti-Sexate, 1968 which later became Anki, 1984) and destroying others.  Like the irritant that creates a pearl, what went into the Cognitos was a tenaciously laborious and unrelenting devotion to teasing out intermediaries of flawlessness and defect.  The results, finally finished in 1984, are a series of brilliant and complex gems that uproot metaphors for the human psyche in dazzling landscapes of black, red, silver and gold. 

The term “cognitos” plays on paradigmatic existential expression (cogito or consciousness) and more familiar cognition (going back to source, the product of these processes), integrated and grouped into a plural. This body of work then marks both a teleological endgame to the original textured abstractions (the last of the Howell panels), and the crescendo of a new discovery of planetary presence, both within and without.  Each work teases out the in-betweens, to discover a ‘new’ experience or understanding hidden away in the peripheries of memory and recognized relationships. The Cognitos, with their reflective terrain of particularized built-up color and boundless perimeters, literally delineate a series of spatial events, to be exposed to physically in perspectival totality, through shifting daylight and passing time.  And as much as their iconic quality reflects messianic distance, illusion and Ganzfeld perceptive sensations, the ebb and flow of personal and private knowledge perfectly grounds each moment into everyday reality. Here the cosmos mirror nature, vice-versa, and beyond; heterogenous self-examination pervades as we reenter our Platonic cave and beat out a shadow above the Minimal and Radical.