murmuration

Traditionally, painting was celebrated for the triumph of illusion, of making oils and canvas look like life; yet filled with energy and movement Gina Raisin’s paintings emerge rather from the heroes of the Modernist era, the Expressionists and Impressionists, whose explorations into form, colour and material fundamentally changed art.

In Gina’s work, colour and paint are used as gestures of narrative, as much as, and indeed maybe more than any forms that manifest.  It is not the glimpse, or suggestion of a familiar shape, rather Gina’s work resonates with a moment of emotional ecstasy, a crescendo. In this, there is a hint of the sublime, where we stand on the precipice of understanding and contemplate both the terror and beauty that resides in the unknowable[1].   In quieter moments, the exhale after the sublime, we are treated to a pause, the outer wave of ripples minutes after the pebble enters the water.

Within Murmuration there is a dance of dualism, it is both chaos and rhythm, a reference to a literal moment of experience, yet also a gesture to an unknowable interior.  Each brushstroke is an entity in itself, acting and existing as its own agent, but simultaneously woven into the larger tapestry of colour.  Each painting is anchored in people or sounds or places that inspire, a microcosm expressed as its smallest elements (the dot after all is at the heart of microscopic representation, the pixels of a digital photograph, the cells of a body), and yet it is an existential mediation of what lies even further beyond what we consider the basic elements or building blocks. Is there an echo between the super micro and the super macro?  If we zoom out far enough or zoom in enough, is everything in fact reduced to stardust?

As early modernists were in part freed by music, its non-literal representation that relied on expression and immersion, Gina’s work also takes cues from the free form spirit of jazz.  The repetition, and experimentation, the ability music has to viscerally change a given moment, take form and flight through Murmuration.  Taking inspiration from her community, Gina drew on the music of Brittany Van Zeil, and the performance of her own composition, using her response to the music to draw another key idea into the work.

Threading its way past the analytical and into the visceral, these paintings ask to suspend disbelief and self-consciousness and embrace an unaffected, unfiltered response. It is all, light and air and colour and movement.  It is the unknown and the known, the clash of articulation and the inarticulable.  It is as simple as dust motes caught in the light on a sleepy, sunny afternoon and it is as expansive as the universe. 

Serena Wong

[1]The feeling of sublime as described here references Jean-François Lyotard in his many works covering the Sublime i.e. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, published in 1991 and The Sublime and the Avant-Garde, published in 1984