Jane Buyers, Nancy Kembry, Catharine MacTavish and Nadia Myre

Super Natural

July 9-31, 2004

The Starry Night Revisited (Night Vision #18)

See how the Dawns have set up their banner in the eastern half of the sky,

Adorning and anointing themselves with sunlight for balm …

She spreads herself out, driving back the formless black abyss …

We have crossed to the farther bank of this darkness …

Radiant Dawn spreads her webs …

Dawn and the Asvins [Rig Veda 1.92]

The Starry Night Revisited is the 18th in an intermittent series of Night Vision paintings that began in the 1970s as a study of visual perception practiced along with attempts to reconcile tensions framed by painterly concerns. In this picture I continued to play with the dichotomies of flat surface and illusory space, form and representation, control and spontaneity, reason and expression, subject and object, the clashing realities at the edge of a painting, and the conundrum of conditioned originality.

A tribute to the MOMA painting that in part inspired the series, The Starry Night Revisited maps Van Gogh's nightscape in its lower half. As the eye moves upwards, Van Gogh's organization morphs into my own examination of the night sky informed by optics and characterized by permeable boundaries, with a wink at Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

The work is driven by two consonant impulses: a "depth necessity" to express, to utter, to communicate, to point and depict when compelled by the spectre of significance; and the experience, shared by Van Gogh and spoken in Vedas, of the ineffable reflected and conveyed in splendor, even in our awkward approximations.

In this set of coordinates, the response to the moment of wonder is anything but still and silent. It entails a lot of arm waving – a frenetic pigment semaphore.

The Starry Night Revisited collapses the boundary between subject and object, inner and outer, in several ways. The surface is treated as a plane of 2-dimensional phase information suspended between viewer and scene, a holographic paradigm that respects the flatness of the canvas and encodes the image as illusory, appearing only relative to and in dependence upon the viewer.

But the viewer also appears in dependence upon the view. I signaled this inseparability by reducing to motifs unconscious visual phenomena generated by our perceptual apparatus and integrating them into the painting: haloed corneal dings, t-square defying lens astigmatism, retinal d.p.i. speckle, electrochemical buzz, flotsam and jetsam afloat in the eyeball, diffraction patterns and the crisp, high-resolution geometry of diffused light under close scrutiny. This is the process of life drawing taken to the ultimate degree, with attention directed to data inaccessible to the camera, behind the eyes. Objects and selves appear to exist apart from each other to the degree that this “noise” is edited out. These colorful grains, webs, sparkles and patterns are apparent when we look through dirty glasses, sleep deprivation, or eyes squeezed tight. They vanish when attention focuses on the objectified world and we forget our role in its creation.

I aimed for a work that celebrates the paradox of vision's own evanescence.

-Catharine MacTavish
July 2004

More about the Night Vision series can be found at
http://members.rogers.com/kelsangchenma - click on art work