INTO THE LIGHT

October 25 - December 7, 2024
Opening Reception: October 25, 6-9 PM

Artists:
Jennifer Coates, Alison Kudlow, Johanna Robinson, Esther Ruiz,
and Julie Torres

Curated by Gina Mischianti

Peninsula is pleased to present Into the Light, a group exhibition curated by Gina Mischianti featuring multidisciplinary artists Jennifer Coates, Alison Kudlow, Johanna Robinson, Esther Ruiz, and Julie Torres. Eschewing the more traditional use of light as a gentle and inviting beacon, the featured artworks implement luminosity, iridescence, and prismatic colors as a sublime, but ominous force. In these works, light is alien and overpowering, possessing an unsettlingly nebulous menace. Beautiful, bright visuals are pushed to their limits, transforming these aesthetics into an entity that inspires awe, attraction, bewilderment, and dread.

Jennifer Coates implements harsh, unnatural auras in her depictions of pastoral landscapes. Flora and fauna in Coates’s environments are traced in electrified hues. The simplified outlines of branches, blades of grass, and animals radiate a glow, implying untouchable divinity. Although the forms of the wilderness within her large-scale paintings are presented as flat, abstract shapes, the brightness emitted in these scenes creates a sense of endless scope. We are given a glimpse of an ascendant plane, beyond the mortal realm of existence. These unattainable paradises tempt people to enter, but also give a foreboding, unearthly vibe that portends peril for all that dare.

Alison Kudlow’s ceramic sculptures of twisted organic forms are filled with shimmering glass. These pieces are traumas and tribulations of the corporeal form made manifest, encapsulating bodily changes throughout pregnancy, lactation, sickness, and surgery. Resembling an amalgamation of seed pods, fungal growths, and monstrous deep sea creatures, these hostile looking figures possess stark, monochromatic carapaces that are split open to reveal brilliant innards. Rainbow inflected glasswork sits within. It pools, dribbles, oozes, crystallizes, and crusts over, all at once, defying classification as solid or liquid. Like ichor or discharge, the opalescent substance bubbles and leaks out of openings in the ceramic shells, a dazzling symptom of entropy, gravity, and decay.

Employing an off-kilter isometric perspective and a menagerie of spindly beasts straight out of an illuminated manuscript, the paintings of Johanna Robinson present surreal settings that sit outside of time. Depictions of gates found in Brooklyn are rendered as if they are entrances to palatial gardens found on a medieval tapestry; a seaside view evokes maps of antiquity, complete with roving leviathans cresting within the darkened waves. To further emphasize this disorienting, atemporal feeling, light functions without rational logic within Robinson’s work; Shadows are scant or even non-existent, intense surges of light emanate from unexpected, random sources. Often, the paintings are bathed in an eerie, glowing haze of indigos and greens. These locations can exist in midday, twilight, and the dead of night all at once—preternatural domains displaced from a tangible time and place. Additionally, Robinson’s latest series of works explores the sun as a harbinger of various misfortunes and conflict. She delves into the mythology and superstition attached to solar cycles, each sun in her series presented as a uniquely all-pervasive, threatening presence, blindingly incandescent with heat and uncontrollably burning above all.

Tubes of neon, mirrors, concrete, plaster, and stone comprise the wall reliefs and small sculptural works of Esther Ruiz. Blaring strips of light are affixed to meticulously polished bases and reflective surfaces, turning common, everyday materials into otherworldly foreign objects. The seemingly incongruous jumble of items meld seamlessly. Riding the line between mechanically produced and handmade, the fastidious nature of the constructs signals that they are relics of an advanced culture taken out of time and context. The neon is formed into radiant rings to create structures akin to both halos and portals, further punctuating an implied sense of sacred importance. Yet, the implied, fictitious “true purpose” of Ruiz’s works remains tantalizing, just out of reach. Gaps are intentionally left open. They are disquietingly indecipherable, meant to tease and confound.

Julie Torres renders ephemeral light solid in her small scale paintings. The bend and prismatic colors of the rainbow are used as an overarching visual motif, repeated over and over—carved, scraped, and smeared into the picture plane. Layers of color accumulate, thickly clinging to and bunching on the surface. Despite the paintings' compact size, there is a staggering amount of detail within each frame. Entire spectrums of hidden hues peer through the craggy topography of the caked-on paint and turbulent brushstrokes. Torres’s paintings embody the primal magnetism of the rainbow, as well as the impossible, maximalist desire to truly harness and possess it. Her works become totems of that voracious, overwhelming attraction towards the beauty of this natural phenomenon.