Court Tree Collective presents “Future Primitive”, a set of works that represent original approaches to artistic styles drawn from the ancestral past.
Jeanne Tremel’s improvised sculptures—made from objects gleaned while beachcombing—fill a void of a modern-day archeologist. Creating handmade instruments like fixtures from the past. The spiritual paintings of Michael McGrath render uncanny subjects—ghosts, floating faces, arched cats, monsters — in a playfully crude style, like the illustrations to some haunted, obscure folklore. Pushing this style further, Saxon Quinn’s compositions pose sketchy shapes on opaque backgrounds, in a messy arrangement that seems to encompass cosmic bodies and pop culture alike, following a tradition somewhere between cave painting and de Kooning. The scratched faces of Yool Kim’s paintings crowd her canvas like the chatty spirits of ancestors, outlined with manic precision in vivid colors. Together, these works suggest the persistence of the distant past within the work of contemporary artists.
