Patrick Mahon’s new exhibition, Drop, is composed of three sets of work. The first set, Drop 1-12, is a series of thick, acrylic panels laser-cut to resemble floating squares of paper or fabric. Each is embellished with splats, drops and dribbles made by pouring coloured resin through stencils onto the works’ clear surfaces. Mounted several inches away from the gallery wall, this set of glass-like panels uses colour and light to invent a tableau of cloth shapes that invoke stained flags or softly fluttering, animation cells. The second set, Float 1 & 2, are multi-part, wall-bound works made from red acrylic cut to resemble splattered rectangles that appear to float in an indeterminate space. The third set, Dribble Wall, is a large-scale field of white vinyl, printed with a pattern of line-drawn dribbles and punched with holes that expose a transparent orange layer underneath.

The droplet is the central motif in Patrick Mahon’s new body of work – it is variously associated with Abstract Expressionist painting, Japanese anime, and popular iconic representations of paint itself. As in his previous exhibition, Veil 1 & 2 (a pair of semi-transparent, multi-layered blue and white curtains lit from within), the artist employs the visceral “splat”. Drop shows us a similarly animated environment in which ubiquitous blots appear to float and dribble on and off the gallery walls. The splat that coloured the curtains in Veil 1&2 now embellishes the acrylic cloth-shapes in Drop. This familiar sign conjures the notion of the organic: a tear, blood, spilled milk or paint. Yet it also makes reference to Mahon’s interest in iconography and representation by conjuring the readable Rorschach inkblot, the handwritten scrawl, or the intoned gesture in a trail of paint.

In Out Here In Space, Fuglem works blind by turning her back on the camera to become the subject of her own images. At first glance the photograph’s content is uncertain, but Fuglem’s obfuscation of the subject is deliberate. Her skin acts as a filmic negative when the image is inverted: pores become stars, moles resemble planets and nebulae.
In her past works Fuglem has explored the realm of the scarcely seen and the not quite understood through her use of barely perceptible, evanescent and mundane materials such as light, breath, plastic bags, packing tape, and bubble gum. She ties the ephemeral to the corporeal by using these materials in conjunction with breathing, captured breath and the movement of air. In her work titled Cumulous (2000), cloud-like, air-filled plastic bags are suspended from the ceiling, representing the accumulated exhalations and countless spoken exchanges that have taken place within the space. In Bubblicious (2000), chewed gum is blown into bubbles, thus holding the trace of breath. Both works are examples of Fuglem’s interest in the continual state of human exchange.
Relationships, vulnerability and the examination of minutia are common themes in both Fuglem’s installations as well as her new photographs. The indistinct physicality of “what we almost see” figures greatly in Out Here In Space – the precise location of the photographs reside neither in the body nor in the world surrounding it. They are nebulous and provoke a release from the desire to come to a concrete conclusion. Fuglem’s work compels one to look again and see something different each time. The everyday world comes alive, strangely transformed and full of potential.