MMoCA Winter 2020 newsletter

EXHIBITIONS & NEWS
JAMES CAGLE
Excavation
Imprint Gallery • Feb 29–May 24
James Cagle’s 1974 film, Excavation,
accompanies the artist’s larger photographic
exhibition on view in the museum’s
State Street Gallery. As with his
photographs, Cagle’s films demonstrate
his interest in formalism, an approach to
filmmaking that emphasizes the physical
properties of film as a material, rather than
film as a narrative tool. Formalist explorations
in film typically involve experiments
with sound, light and exposure, time and
movement, shot composition, editing, and
the varied ways in which all of these qualities
can operate together on screen.
Cagle plays with each of these elements in
Excavation. He floods the viewer with a deluge
of sensory information—rapid editing, superimposed frames, flashing imagery, accelerated zooming, and rhythmic
sound. Visually fragmented, yet unified by recurring motifs, the film surveys the artist’s external landscape—rocks
and canyons, trees, the female body, pointing fingers, etc.—as a means to hint at his interior mindscape. The pulsating,
exhilarating soundtrack drives the film forward, complementing the cadence of the visuals. In creating this film,
Cagle not only “excavates” the private workings of his inner world, but also the material components of filmmaking.
RAY YOSHIDA
The Spaces in Between
Henry Street Gallery • On view through April 12
Ray Yoshida: The Spaces in Between is a comprehensive look at the talented Chicago-based artist known for his experimental
and innovative works of art. In a series of paintings from the 1970s, Yoshida depicted a set of abstract shapes
that evoke just the sort of visual investigation that he strove to elicit: are they figures, tools, land formations? In Untitled,
geometric structures appear to bulge and sprout appendages amid a background scattered with patches and dots of
color. When asked about the patterning and its algae-like formations, Yoshida remarked that he was very interested
in “the concept of conscious and unconscious... I don’t know if whether you have ever experienced sort of taking a nap
or lying in the afternoon...with your eyes closed and seeing sort of these forms floating.” This allusion to the optical
science of perception, together with the painting’s stippled patterning, is grounded in Yoshida’s fascination with the Neo-
Impressionist artist Georges Seurat. He regularly walked by the artist’s pointillist masterpiece A Sunday on La Grande
Jatte—1884 on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. In particular, Yoshida was intrigued by “the frozen quality” of
Seurat’s figures, which mirror the rigid bodies in his own
paintings. Yoshida’s patterning also nods to Seurat’s use
of pointillism, but as a master of reinvention, he creates
his own form of pointillism. While the technique of pointillism
is the application of small dots to the surface of the
painting, Yoshida’s technique is the inverse—Yoshida lays
down a color for the ground of the painting, in this case a
bright white, then paints on top of this base layer, carefully
generating small windows for the white to peek through.
While the collection of objects in this painting hover in
a flotsam of marks, it remains a cohesive and rhythmic
group that delights the eye and intrigues the mind.
Exhibitions in the Henry Street Gallery are generously
funded through an endowment established by the Pleasant
T. Rowland Foundation.
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