Out of the Heart of Light

Page II

There has always been the sense of something arising in Hedrick’s works, but in this exhibition of nine paintings from 2007 and 2008, there is something more occurring, something new happening, and the title of the exhibition, “Awakening,” is precisely right. In the press materials distributed by the gallery, Hedrick says that these paintings are a departure for her. Her previous works she characterizes as “interior and reflective.” These are the result of “a meditation on nature.”

Hedrick’s attention has turned outward, from the inward focus of rumination to the reflection on the world, and one does not require her statement to recognize it. The indicators of it are difficult to isolate. But they are tangible presences, subtle suggestions of a change of orientation, felt implications like tendrils of intimations stretching through the gallery room, lacing through the paintings, drawing one from each near realization to the next, like a finger running along the articulate veins of the nerves, along the network of a sensation that is also an intuition. You feel something whelming up, something different from what this artist has shown us before, something just breaking through like a shoot pressing the earth from below.

Perhaps the one overt matter here is the handling of color. These works lean more towards the monochromatic than has been the case with Hedrick prior. The colors are more distributed among the individual works than across individual surfaces, as if the impression at hand has been allotted to the works in coordination, as if they were of a piece—as if they made a story.

And as one walks through the gallery space, the realization comes. The paintings add up, and one realizes what one is witnessing is a new Creation myth. Emergence has always been implicit in Hedrick’s art, but the aligning of the colors, the ordering of the color compositions, has created a segmenting, a distribution and ordering, of the thought of her art. The paintings in “Awakening” are distributed almost entirely in three colors: those from yellow to white, those in blue, and those in green, with one painting—Rose is Rose is Rose, 2007—in the titular tone, the single exception. The three colors take emergence in three directions and acquire a symbolic valency, a sense of something specific rising up, coming into existence.

In the works of white to yellow, such as Ochre, Rising Pale, 2008, Light Sequence, 2007-8, and Bright, Light, Bright, 2008, the coagulation appears to be of pure light, illumination formulating of its own, as if there were nothing to illuminate, as if before there were anything to illuminate, as if all there were to see were the characteristics of light generating itself out of mists of nothing: the shifts of densities, of shimmers, of half-created to manifested brilliancies. In two of the works—Ochre, Rising Pale and Bright, Light, Bright—the brightest areas are coalesced, unusual for Hedrick, into near forms: embryonic, only partially present, they seem something like flames, rising up the center of each composition, revealing themselves dimly as light in the center of fields of light, or as pillars of fire. At the center of each composition, but not of each work, for all three works are organized as triptychs, as sets of three individual compositions. Hedrick says in the press materials that the multi-part works here (others are composed of more than three panels) are intended to be reminiscent of Renaissance altarpieces, and thereby is announced the intention of a sense of creation more specific and targeted than that of aesthetic creativity.

In the works of blue—Blue Awakening, 2007, Dawn, Blue and Gray, 2008, and River, Breath, 2007—the symbolic valency of the imagery is clearly sky. A created world is forming, a separation of heaven and earth, as well as the separation of the inner world and the outer, for another implication of the blue—one knows it purely out of impulse, for no reason one can cite, perhaps out of the vision of the concrete creation of immateriality, perhaps by the “logic” of the color itself—is thought itself. And the condensing center of Blue Awakening feels like light in the steaming formlessness lacing itself together with an awareness, like a ghost present in the void, like an eye opening—a forming world knowing its witness is there to observe it: looking back.

In the works of green—Ode to Temair, 2007-8, and Green, Rising, Green, 2007-8—the symbolic implication is as inevitable as it is in the blue works. It is life, vegetation, the creation of the living presence in the world. And one obviously may include Rose is Rose is Rose in this. And the entire exhibition itself—the story it makes—becomes a triptych. And “Temair” is Gaeilge (the native language of the Irish) for the Hill of Tara in Ireland, the mythical dwelling place of the gods and the entrance to the otherworld. And the implication—the story—is complete.

And the next turn in the larger story is clear. This exhibition is the myth of spring returning, of the world re-arising, of new life forming itself out of the wreckage of the old. It is Genesis, come again.

That is its story. Its nature is the aesthetic conviction, the aesthetic mission, of Julie Hedrick in all her work: the re-emergence of art, art returning to the creation and conveyance of a world of its own, as large and extensive, as varied and rich, as the world we discover around us—art as the observed world transformed, as the vehicle of the fusion of the inner and the outer. Art as honor, not the spite of ridicule, and thus as much the expression and impulse of self-respect as of respect and serious regard for the world we encounter, for the life around us. Art as the opposite of mockery, and smug self-satisfaction. Or, more simply, art as life. And Hedrick rediscovers it, here as in all her work, precisely where T. S. Eliot wrote it would be found and always will be harbored: along the surface glittering “out of heart of light.”

© Mark Daniel Cohen—Nietzsche Circle, 2008

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, June 2008)

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