Alteronce Gumby: Prince of the Far Rainbow
"I think of myself as an artist explorer. With each painting, I’m trying to redefine color for myself."—Alteronce Gumby
Nicola Vassell is pleased to present Prince of the Far Rainbow, an exhibition of new work by Alteronce Gumby that continues his rigorous exploration of color and the way it shapes our experience of the world around us. The exhibition features a suite of new abstract paintings, including new iterations of his 'moonwalker' compositions, along with works on paper and the introduction of new 'rainbow' and 'falling rainbow' paintings, all of which are born from and expand upon the last two years Gumby spent researching the material depths of color.
In the two years since his previous exhibition with Nicola Vassell, Gumby has traveled across the world in pursuit of experiences that could alter, even intensify, his perception of color. The original impetus for these travels was Gumby’s work, along with director John Campbell, on the documentary COLOR. From the Moroccan desert to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and from the Holi festival in India to visions of the Northern Lights in Alaska, Gumby looked to these geologically, culturally and atmospherically specific expressions of color to both enlarge his own understanding of the phenomenon and to expand the scope of his practice.
Essential to Gumby’s process is the study of and attention to the energetic properties of color and how they both reflect and react to space. His ‘moonwalker’ paintings continue to be a generous expression of his research and thinking on this front. Set atop mirrors colored with acrylic and structured around the careful placement of gemstones like agate and quartz, lapis and malachite, Gumby builds his compositions with fragments and shards of colored glass that he previously shattered.
What results is a shimmering, mosaic-like surface that, evoking the wind-swept movements of the desert, or perhaps the jagged and uneven surfaces of distant planets, changes in appearance as our physical position does too. They reflect the change in their environment just as they contribute to its moment-by-moment reconstitution. Their shifting color embodies the fact that all is in motion around us.
Gumby’s use of mirrors as a type of substrate is a new development in his work, and as such they provide a form of reflection both literal and metaphorical in equal measure. Just as the mirrors fragment our bodies before making them whole again, so too might we remember that our own self-understanding is always evolving and never static. Originally interested in the use of mirrors after contemplating the cosmic photography produced by NASA’s telescopes, Gumby has employed them for purposes that, while far more earthly in emphasis, are nonetheless oriented towards the revelation of matter.
In his square ‘rainbow’ paintings, Gumby continues to explore how we process the world through color. As a physical manifestation of the interaction between the sun and our planet, a rainbow symbolically expresses both the range and depth of sensory experience. Gumby echoes this relationship by allowing light to be refracted by acrylic colored mirrors, precious gemstones and shattered glass into a spectrum of color more complex than what is typically visible in the sky above us.
The three ‘falling rainbow’ paintings offer another way of reflecting upon our phenomenological experience of color. With red, yellow and blue as the basis for their respective compositions, these monochromatic resin paintings are then affixed with naturally dyed silks that flow down from the picture plane and pool onto the gallery floor. Gumby’s use of natural dyes stems from his recent participation in the Mothership natural dye residency in Tangier, where he would stroll through city gardens and collect all manner of plant life that would act as the base of his dyes. The dyes he used on silk textiles invoke their origin in flora and fauna, while the silks provide a tactile expression of their new and unique form of color.
The variety of media that Gumby is working with attests to his desire to bring his ideas for color expression beyond any single container for them. Through his prismatic approach to form, Gumby posits his art as an extension of the world at large: multifarious and ever-expanding.
