Ariel Zhang: Distant View Nearby
The name of this exhibit is also the same for the whole body of work on display, an oxymoron of oil paintings on panels echoing the space it portrays.
For Ariel Zhang seemingly abides by the artistic laws governing linear perspective in her observations of interiors both close yet far away with the intent to accurately depict the chosen site but she really ends up bending the rules of the genre as if M.C. Escher, known for his drawing of a hand drawing a hand drawing the same hand, having an imaginary conversation with Masaccio about variant angles for two-or three-point depth in a parallel if not alternate universe.
From spatial representation that abstracts the architectural, the singularity of her vision to frame, crop, and delineate actual space also tessellates the entire area of ceiling, floor, walls and doors into a complex and complicated visual illusion. So what appears as factual record of the scene are in fact, curiously spare compositions of perhaps forgotten though familiar rooms or institutional hallways stripped bare into moody geometric forms often merging into itself that now distort our sense of place as well as time.
Which in turn causes a Droste effect to activate the whole gallery into a site-specific installation, too, as each piece then becomes a window which reflects upon the others to create de facto infinity mirrors. This sort of mise en abyme whereby a picture recursively appearing within itself produces a loop which in theory could go on forever that the artist knowingly generates is really meta, her version of the homunculus argument as Russian tea dolls as Chinese boxes in a dream within a dream and so forth and so forth and so forth ad infinitum…
And so Ariel Zhang repeats the tradition of repeating herself following such masters like Giorgio Morandi or Chuck Close who limited their oeuvre to expand their practice by repeating themselves.