Recent Work – Charlie Satterlee

Press Release
The Maillardville Cultural Appreciation Society is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent work by Charlie Satterlee. Deriving largely from an adept concentration on the incidental results of production, Satterlee creates intuitive and formally driven works undermining immediate legibility. These utilize peripheral materials and motifs to highlight aesthetic similarities between disparate elements. This exhibit will feature a series of wooden panels with unique three-dimensional compositions on each surface. The works will be coupled with a small formally linked video displayed within a larger panel. Outside the gallery there will be a large-scale image open to the elements for the duration of the exhibit.

Colour Space

There is a video of Richard Tuttle methodically arranging clumps of brightly coloured wet pulp at a paper making studio. After finishing these compositions the artist, with calculated imprecision, disfigures each one by cutting, squishing or pounding them into their final form. He seems completely engulfed in this production, at times revealing an underlying joy of disappearing into the process of unselfconscious work. It was a way of thinking where the investment in the physical nature of the work obliterated any other concerns it could produce. You know it takes a lot of thinking to get to that point, yet here it looks almost like a caricature of artistic naivety. When you showed me this video it seemed to make sense for a reason I didn’t yet understand.

Relaxation and focus seem to have a causal relationship in creation, however it is tenuous to place either one firmly as cause or effect. What is most valuable is that somehow at a moment in time nothing matters other than the forms and materials directly facing you. Things made with a pervading anxiety of acceptance are troublesome to properly appreciate. We instead find an attraction to the incidental; not the products of industry, but the serendipitous waste created by it becomes our focus. They are without transparent intent and so elicit a different level of contemplation. A piece we appreciate for its simple organization in space.