In FOYER-LA’s current project, No Respite, the artists Lucy Puls, Nick Taggart, and Connie Walsh embrace the fragility of transitions- the shifting tensions within a relentless state. Amy Sillman describes this condition in her book, Faux Pas. Selected Writings and Drawings as, “looking for this fragile thing that is awkwardness.” An improvisational guitar performance by Dakota Higgins, opens an opportunity to lose one’s bearings amidst pieces of disparate material assembled over great distances of time and space. No Respite asks the viewer to feel some pressure, then release, while the work collectively seeks a momentary stillness- a refuge- within unrelenting force.
Connie Walsh’s photographs pursue the existence of a core where pauses or in-betweens are often overlooked. Her reframed architectural spaces are torqued: ceilings become floors, repetitive lines establish corridors, pathways to light are suggested, gravity as we understand it collapses. The images feel disorienting, yet the rhythm of reoccurring architectural elements- 1x3 planks give the viewer footholds to negotiate the perceived space. The viewer is left choosing between surrendering to a sense of floating or remaining outside of it altogether. Walsh is interested in the idea of suspension within loss or disorientation: the possibility of staying flexible within no respite. In an excerpt from a February 1995 conversation between Jackie Winsor and Barry Ledoux, Winsor explains her preference for the word “engaging” over “evocative” to describe the feeling her work evokes: “It addresses your physicality with its physicality, it addresses your closeness with its open invitation to closeness and it invites you to your center within its center.”
Nick Taggart’s large-scale pencil drawings of clouds, lake reflections, and the interior of the human body morph into abstract shapes, emphasizing negative space as a counterpoint to intricate detail. Through careful observation and exquisite draftsmanship, Taggart renders interstitial space- the fragile balance between pressure and release- territory left undefined. He treats the negative, “empty” areas of his composition with equal consideration to observed natural phenomena, offering the viewer an unknowable place suspended within weighted tension. Taggart describes this interplay: “The imagery becomes ambiguous and disorienting, giving the viewer the opportunity to interpret the visual information like a Rorschach test, allowing the drawings to provide multiple interpretations.”
Lucy Puls’ sculptures open a conversation about where action and reaction originate. Materials bolted in place generate folds, wraps, building layers of complexity. Is the inside pushing out, or is the outer shell holding in? As Puls writes in a journal entry dated October 3, 1987,” …don’t know what to make of the bolted, strip pieces…I like the mystery- the outside looks pretty quiet- it’s the inside- negative space, where the action- complexity is.” Salvaged materials are incorporated with composite materials disclosing the beauty of restraint. Puls describes the work as moving beyond mere parts, from “a quiet existence between elements” toward “a straining, tautness in the relationship.” No Respite proposes that with continuous tension there are moments of lightness- unknown potentiality within the fluctuation of force. As Puls puts it in another journal entry (capitalization original): "SHOW HOW THE WORLD IS LIKE A FIST WANTING TO OPEN AND WANTING TO TIGHTEN SIMULTANEOUSLY."
Artists: Lucy Puls, Nick Taggart, Connie Walsh, Dakota Higgins