THE REALITY PRINCIPLE
Karin Davie & Caitlin Teal Price
PFA–Washington, D.C
April 6 - May 25, 2024
Opening reception: Saturday, April 6th, 6 - 8 PM
Caitlin Teal Price, Bue, 2022, x-acto blade etching and colored pencil on hahnemuhle rag paper, 30x40
PRESS RELEASE:
Davie and Price are driven by a shared commitment to form and the importance of process. The works featured in this exhibition present viewers with immersive, psychedelic, abstract terrains that embody the interplay between the micro and the macro, the material and the ephemeral. The careful manipulation of light, color and form could give the viewer the sense that they are looking through a microscope at cellular matter, or through a powerful telescope at intergalactic nebulae. There is a compelling optical contrast between the sense of infinite, deep space evoked by their works, and the tangible physicality of the surfaces they create.
Davie’s seven works featured in the show foreground her mastery of the repeated undulating wave form and gesture. In the larger works, this rhythmic motion skillfully accommodates the borders of her humorously shaped canvases, while in smaller works, it is explored through diptych formats. Price’s nine drawings demonstrate, across a range of sizes, her prowess in intricate, meticulous mark making interwoven with a distinctive use of the play of light. Each artist, grounded in their bodies, undertakes the task of creating with the heightened awareness and hyperfocus similarly required of an athlete. Davie must produce a brush stroke in one steady movement without any room for error lest she must return her surface to the base primer and begin again. Through the mediated layering of gestures, she arranges a series of syncopated waves around a central opening which, when paired with a skillful gradation of color, appears to emanate a shivering light. Price draws in an equally unforgiving procedure that involves incising millimeter-length lines and gouges into a photograph. Her works explore a temporal tension between the capture of a fleeting, almost mischievous instant of natural light and the intensive, tactile labor of etching. Combining these aspects of her process “takes something fluttering and hard to nail down, and puts the concreteness of the physical body back into it.” Stepping back from the intimate, bodily surfaces fashioned by the artists’ concentrated physical mark making, the cosmic scenes remind the viewer of bodies, space, architecture, interiors and exteriors. The key to understanding each artist’s work is physical, substantial, presence.
The Reality Principle refers to the classical psychoanalytic theory of ego regulation; the ability to delay gratification through impulse control and rational thought (a maturing of “The Pleasure Principle,” which compels us to act in pursuit of immediate gratification.) Through controlled, disciplined and choreographed gestures rooted entirely in the concrete and the physical, Davie and Price’s works can make us feel transported to an intangible, metaphysical elsewhere.
An essay by art historian and curator Lily Siegel will accompany this exhibition.
Karin Davie, Traveling solo No. 2 (diptych) 2023, oil in linen, 54x30in.