In Foyer LA’s new project, Implication of Something Real, artists Phyllis Baldino, Gary Cannone, and David Dodge explore various ways that pattern, structures and systems act as organizing framework and index for human behavior and communication. David Dodge reimagines the language of technology and communication systems; charts, diagrams, and symbols map, as Dodge describes, “psychic flows”. In a series of wall-sized drawings, Dodge models forms and assembles connections with a clear but indeterminate intent, from which causality emerges. The drawn line sets up the differential space of an interior and exterior while charting the ineffable. Phyllis Baldino’s video “about symmetry symmetry about” begins with the premise that symmetry exists. Her subjects – a physicist, art installers, a sunbather, people eating corn on the cob- describe the way symmetry provides an organizing rationale that structures or even creates meaning in a variety of domains. Baldino constructs rhythm and commonality in the editing of her profiled subjects exposing a level of absurdity in the practice of certitude. Gary Cannone describes his work as “decidedly reductive art executed with the deft skill of a prop comic.” His work uses the idea of parody, a feeble or ridiculous imitation, to expose assumptions about the nature of art, of language, and the interplay of context, systemized structures and meaning. Ultimately Cannone’s work asserts an underlying vulnerability in the fixity of all things, including ourselves, in their implied, but illusory, functionality. Systems exist to the extent that they are supported by other systems. Yet as Christopher Alexander points out in A Pattern Language, “People are different sizes; they sit in different ways. And yet there is a tendency in modern times to make all chairs alike.” Systems contain uncertainty in the search for the Implication of Something Real.
Artists: Phyllis Baldino Gary Cannone David Dodge
