The Graces and the Minotaur

Opening Reception    May 18th, 2019    4pm-7pm
Closing Reception      June 15th, 2019    4pm-7pm
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Show runs from -
May 18th, 2019 - June 15th, 2019
Open by Appointment
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Artist - Christopher Stephen Koch

​BIOGRAPHY

Christopher Stephen Koch was born into a military family and although he grew up in Baltimore County, he was born in Okinawa, Japan. After living in places such as Chicago, London, and Irvine California, he moved back to Baltimore where he now lives. Koch began painting in high school and furthered his art education with a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003 which included an exchange study at The Slade School of Fine Art University College of London in 2000. Christopher went on to study Philosophy at The University of Chicago in 2004 and University of California from 2007-2008. Having exhibited in group shows in the past, The Graces and the Minotaur at Gallery Blue Door is Christopher Stephen Koch's first solo exhibit.  

​STATEMENT

​I wonder always about function. Does the music improve upon the silence? Does the picture improve upon the wall? I learned to look at pictures in museums, which are, in a way, the worst place to to look at pictures. They gather en masse individual things meant to decorate some one place in particular, bring life into a particular room, reward the idling eye and ease the monotony of the everyday. 

I can’t judge my own success. Gertrude Stein warns us about the inaccrochable - it doesn’t matter how good a picture is if in any case you can’t hang it up on the wall and then entertain guests.  I worry my best work is inaccrochable. But a picture is a thought and some thoughts are irrepressible. Poems emerge when prose fails to track reality. 

Description and definition at best detain what they hope to capture, and there are different kinds of pictures. These pictures are investigations of the affective content of color and the denotational properties of line and how these create the sense of space and engage the intentionality of vision, theorizing the intersections of verisimilitude and cartoon in order to theorize the gap between beast and divinity. Humans fashion gods after their own images inevitably, even as we step away from the contingent forms of physical reality in our best attempts to cognize the divine. Which came first: the Ghost or the Machine? It is part of the way that we survive our consciousness to conceptualize the forces that govern our reality after the forms of human life. Reality is gendered and intentional because perception is patterned after our forms of life, and the patterns of perception precede the categories of observation. The forms of building and boldness are masculine. The forms of craft and grace are feminine. There is at once a masculine aspect and also a feminine aspect of destruction. The day belongs to the sun, father to action and forthright ideas; the night belongs to the moon, mother of dreams. 

These pictures are thoughts and dreams. Dreams end when we wake up. When is a thought complete?  What is its function?