In FOYER-LA’s current project, LINEAGE, Eliza Chaikin Kenan enters into a cross-generational dialogue with work her late father, the pioneering computer artist George Merrill Chaikin, created before she was born.
In a new series of twenty fabric paintings, Eliza Chaikin Kenan explores how space is demarcated through the manipulation of color, line, and placement. Eliza’s study of architecture and experience as a quilter informs her construction of space. These paintings, in grid or linear formations, are two dimensional- yet the viewer finds themselves contained, directed, held and transformed to other implied places. The color planes continue with the adjacent potentiality of connecting to the next suggestion of space. Corridors become dissecting walls which become horizontal surfaces which hint at shadow. Somehow time seems to pause while attempting to inhabit the spatial moment.
In the 70’s at the Computer Graphics Lab of NYU, George Merrill Chaikin was among the first to advance the way in which computers draw curves, resulting in a highly simple and elegant geometrical solution to a complex problem. It became known as the Chaikin Algorithm. He was an early artist to use computers to generate curve drawings from algorithms and to deem it art. The conceived space seems to pulsate in George Chaikin’s work. Eliza observes her father’s work as drawing fragments, geometry that comes out of accidents, “It disappears into itself.”
The work of both artists interplays between flatness and volume; where depth exists somewhere seemingly from behind–pushing into the constructed surface. The sewn stitch in Eliza’s paintings gives a hint of dimensionality. Her father’s etchings initially read flat and yet the interweaving lines of color gradation on monochromatic backgrounds are circuitous journeys of floating volumes. The work in LINEAGE exists within a space all of its own complexity.
