I spell a word to free you
Minami Kobayashi
Adrianne Rubenstein

December 1 - January 13, 2024
2831a Mission St.
Et al. etc.

What are we to paint? The world of pigment and medium, various viscosities, opacities; the divvying up of the picture plane, a tangle of color and line and shape and then emerges images; the play between the surface being purely paint and something greater than the material and process: whole worlds imagined, remembered, combined.

An artist whose works we love was given a choice of who to show beside and she chose an artist we’d shown a decade ago, who loved her work, making the duo easy, the process simple — they talked a little, made some paintings in line with their practice’s trajectory: always learning, observing, painting. These two painters scrumble onto the canvas a reality reflective of the world yet always something more.

The title comes from a poem quoted at the beginning of a chapter in a novel set hundreds of years in the future by Suzette Haden Elgin; the initials of the ‘fictional’ author are given as S. E., the book’s author’s, cited as a ‘twentieth-century poet’: it’s a temptation, a dream, to cast one’s work into the distant future as known and quotable. The poem begins:

Friend, your mind has betrayed you

On the back of your eyes

It shines lies and says “It’s real! It’s real!”

Go out and die for it!”

But what are we to do, besides follow our mind, our heart, forward into the wilderness?