Dreams Of Transcendence
James Perkins
April 15 - May 6, 2023
Diamond In The Back, 2022
Silk, sun, sand, salt, wind, wood, ocean and bay water
110 x 29 x 3 3/4 in (279.4 x 73.7 x 9.5 cm)
C O U N T Y is pleased to present Dreams of Transcendence, an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist James Perkins. On view from April 15 – May 6, 2023, Perkins’ work blurs the lines between sculpture and painting, monumental land art and temporary earthworks, and human intervention and nature.
In Dreams of Transcendence, Perkins challenges the concept of seriality with his Post-Totem Structures, joining humans with nature, unbound by self-identity and interconnected by one beautiful vision. Perkins’ series transcends our expectations and elevates our thoughts as his works capture the intense power of nature and the beauty resulting from working together as one.
Dreams of Transcendence are mixed media wall reliefs made of silk, sun, sand, salt, wind, wood, and water. Made on the beach of his Fire Island studio, Perkins employs a process he developed in 2016 to invent a new type of painting and explore the beauty and experience of weathering the vicissitudes of life. Taking up to two years to complete a single work, Perkins creates “paintings” that started their lives as sculptures through performative time-based land art installations using the forces of nature to mark time on stretched silks, linens, and other fabrics of life, as it were. The works have characteristic gestures, including stripes down the main viewing plane reminiscent of Barnette Newman zips and Mark Rothko-like color fields. Along with this, the forces of nature are magically captured on the surface of the paintings, evidence of the material being attacked by water blowing across the fabric, or even salt, pollen, leaves, sand, or roots still clinging to the surfaces.
Perkins’ post-totem structures are monumentally elegant in appearance, yet the artist’s process is acutely critical of society’s inclination to establish hierarchies of value that divide us from the natural world, and each other. Through an idiosyncratic exploration of material culture, art history, personal experience, and philosophical prompts, Perkins reshapes land art to suggest a more vulnerable and generous approach toward the world around us. In many ways, Perkins makes this work equally in reverence and refutation of the white-centric masculine egotism of Land Art and Minimalism in search of an art for all humanity.
- Lauren R. O’Connell, Curator at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
Through his Post-Totem Structures, Perkins seeks to contribute to a history of philosophies, inspired by the ideals of Dansaekhwa masters, like Lee Ufan, wabi-sabi, land and earth art, Transcendentalism and Romanticism, combined with the ethos of environmentalism. Perkins’ new type of “painting” system in nature where the sculpture and the painting happen simultaneously ask us to question form, identity, process, and our relationship with the land. Additionally, Perkins expands the definition of a work’s life cycle, by considering Walter De Maria’s desire for viewer duration, see Lighting Field, with Robert Smithson’s “nonsite” nomenclature.
Dreams of Transcendence culminates in an experience that Perkins describes as, “allowing one to witness a transformation of the material and meetings between the sky and the work, we all have a horizon.”