Cosmic Black & The Silver Lining



Cosmic Black & The Silver Lining

+4Arthouse is proud to present Cosmic Black & The Silver Lining, an exhibition of new works on paper, paintings, and a book by the collaborative duo The Secret Third. This is The Secret Third's first exhibition at +4 and +4's inaugural exhibition.

Cosmic Black & The Silver Lining
consists of two primary elements, each of which has two parts.
One aspect are the black and white graphic works (paintings and drawings), taking their cues from the epic, from landscape, natural forces, and spiritual diagrams (Sri yantras, tetramorphs / seraphim. As well as compositions from classic masterpieces, and organic patterns, as in not precisely measured). The angels / tetramorphs have an equal vertical and horizontal axis; assembled/folded they form an open-topped cube. There are black angels as opposed to the neuter white variety.
The paintings (some still wet), include materials like glitter (glitter, like stars, glitter for girls), silver, salt, and spraypaint. Created on black paper they refer to mountains, cascading waterfalls, dripping fluids, milk & mercury. In their appearance and process are rain, storms, lightning, the cosmic and the interstellar, deep space and the infinite.

The second aspect is a book (available as a PDF) that opens with titles that are readable as very concentrated poems, or one longform piece. The book then continues through more than three-dozen technicolor collages, making references and inferences in many directions. The book is a cosmogenesis blossoming forth from the pregnant void of the other works in the exhibition. The book reads like a shredding guitar solo about art as a force of nature, and technology as another kingdom of life in a mythic world where wild(er)ness and the sublime coalesce in amplified sincerity.

Post-rock informs the show in thematics and in aesthetic contrast as the narrative arc oscillates between the majestically dark and technicolor hope. There are monolithic, black, forbidding features, then there is a colorful, concentrated, bright book. The narrative of: from dark to light, from tenebrous and austere, to bright, complex & intimate. It is a hopeful narrative.

The show was created by The Secret Third, a mysterious and longstanding collaboration between Noah Travis Phillips and Jennifer Lord.












The Silver Lining demos book
http://bit.ly/20OCB6t (PDF)