Brian Kain - Simple Compounds & Compound Image

Simple Compounds & Compound Image
by Brian Kain
October 1 - November 10, 2001

simple.compounds.&.compound.image presents three sculptural situations that explore language and materiality: things as they are. Brian Kain's inquiry exemplifies the dialectic and demonstrates the materiality of language.

Curator Lori Rubeling, instructor in art at Villa Julie, introduces Kain's works:

"Ideas and images are the media of our thoughts. We use ideas and images to compose meanings and relationships to things. They are the mind's materials. Language and Pictures are sub-genres of Material. This has been demonstrated in the provenance of Art for millennia. It is the operation of Language that isolates an image. It is the appearance of a Picture that isolates a word."

This show includes a catalog dialog between the curator and the artist that explores the language and materiality exhibition themes. An excerpt from this dialog follows.

Brian Kain - Simple Compounds & Compound Image

Rubeling
"So, I look at a page of Simple Compounds and Iapprehend a pattern and then I see the parts of the pattern, the grammar of language, and then I read it and then I begin to picture things; I make associations. Can you continue on with this thought? What am I engaged in?"

Kain
"I would say it is the materiality that you are engaged in. As the material comes together it also breaks down into the parts you named as pattern, grammar, language, pictures - which add to the stuff and moves the stuff around. This is mirrored in the physical format of the work - the words construct the pattern as the pattern constructs the words."

Brian Kain - Simple Compounds & Compound Image

Triangulation
There are authors to things and materials of the things authored. And then there are other authors that look at the things made. This triangulated activity falls into the category of art: music and poetry, architecture or sculpture, and pictures... (from Brian Kain)

Brian Kain - Simple Compounds & Compound Image

An artist thinks and reflects on ideas and experiences and then, because he or she can, takes these thoughts and by combining materials, sets them out for another to take in. (from Brian Kain)

What is the most efficient material for a thought? Musical harmony, then a song, and then speech. There is a slippery slope of materials from speech that involves the materiality of vision combined with the physical world: light and shadow; gravity and form; tough and texture; surface and ground; this and that. (from Brian Kain)

Brian Kain lives and works out of his studios in Emmitsburg, Maryland. In 1984 he was awarded a BFA degree in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He studied painting with George Ortman, Cranbrook Academy of Art and completed his MFA studies in Sculpture with Michael D. Hall at Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1990.

Kain has been investigating language and materiality since the early 1990's. Additional works include The Plywood series; Interdependencies; Displacements; The Center of Things; The Order of Things; and The Picture of Things. He has exhibited in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions. His works can be found in private collections across the country.