Multiple Expanse

Photo credit Matthew Hayes

Multiple Expanse exhibition statement

The world is constantly expanding. It looks like lava crawling to the ocean to form expanded shores. Like seeds on the wind, or concrete towering into the sky. And while species churn through time, defining new geometries and proliferating into new territories, the cosmos reach ever further to unknowable limits. In Multiple Expanse, artist Carolyn Code exhibits four new works for the first time, all of which reflect and express the notion of expansion. Alternatively using organic shapes and hard-edge lines, Code builds on installation strategies from past work and expands her own practice with fresh mediums and themes in this focused survey of new work.

Peridiole, for example, sends spore-like objects adrift. This colourful meandering recalls other pieces by the artist, which spill across walls and floors in hypnotic waves. It also represents a more recent attention to bright colours, which Code employs throughout the show. In Sum of its Parts more rigid forms create a sense of growth and, in Multiple Expanse, geometry that finds kinship in 20^th-century artists like Emma Kunz and Hilma af Klint. Event Horizon I, II, and III reiterate the natural balance of this cycle, captures the tension between expansion and collapse for the opposite of expansion is decline, recession, or collapse, a fate we see imagined in beautifully rendered black holes.

– Hannah Keating