While there is a certain futility associated with artist statements, suggesting a level of intellectual authority or conceptual boundary on artwork that is disingenuous, John Kissick's method of working is procedurally messy, historically contingent and just plain slippery. As a result, while acknowledging the interpretive procedures at play in viewing painting, he's come to accept the limits of any set discourse to do justice to the raw experience of looking.

That paintings in his current exhibition are an extension of a project that has occupied him for the better part of a decade: the construction of a painting practice that is in a critical (and at times highly problematic) dialogue with the historical conventions of abstraction. Though it has been tempting (and in some circles inevitable) to read the work as a knowing critique of historical models of self-expression, it is his hope that his work appears slightly more puzzling and unexpected, and perhaps less fixed to any certain interpretative or critical position. 

Max Ernst coined the term "fever vision" in the early 1920s to describe a kind of visual delirium and psychological slippage  that can occur in front of certain kinds of visual assemblages. John Kissick finds himself inreasingly attracted to this notion because it emphasizes a certain heightened loss of control on the part of the viewer in attempting to apprehend meaning. Further, it implies illness, corruption, convalescence — apt metaphors for the historical predicament of abstract painting. Throughout the years the central issue of his painting has remained intact: how to make abstract paintings that appear knowing without succumbing to easy cynicism, or visually enticing without collapsing into feigned sentiment or pastiche. It is here that the delusion of fever provides for the possibility of meaning.

The point of departure in Dispersions is an ongoing fascination with the questions, what does it mean to paint and how does one make a painting?  Ken Singer's exhibition conceptualizes the point at which a singular mark becomes 'painting' and investigates the effect that repetition and difference have in constructing the painting's meaning. The variation of marks — caused by the multiplicity of contrasting colours and the oscillation of forms in the paintings — activate viewing experience that unites the perception of the visual with the experiential affect on the corporeal. The harmony of the cognitive and the physical is an essential element in Singer's thoughts on painting and his method.

The canvases captures a fragment of a larger, more infinite dispersion by means of depicting a scattering of rhythmic marks: marks that convalesce, migrate, and collide into a vibratory field, a field that optically extends beyond the material limits of the painting itself. These migratory marks have neither home nor destination but rather chart the act of migration itself as mnemonic resonances.

Fundamentally, Dispersions positions abstraction as a site of inquiry not entirely rational or purely intuitive: the work ruminates on the spaces and gaps between order and disorder, territories that are not here but elsewhere, vibrating spaces that are ambiguous, scattered, out of the ordinary and displaced.