Archived Exhibition

Justin Quinn: “Keep Out This Frost —Works on Paper
November 19 to December 19, 2009
Opening reception on Thursday, November 19, 6:00 – 8:30pm
Artist talk: 7:00 pm

More work by Justin Quinn

Cain Schulte Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the opening of their exhibition of new works on paper by Justin Quinn.  Quinn translates his personal obsessions into exquisitely subtle artwork that explores, amplifies, and ultimately celebrates, the single element, the ordinary, and the repetitive. This is Justin Quinn’s second solo show with Cain Schulte.

Justin Quinn continues his transcription of Herman Melville’s epic Moby Dick into the letter E. This letter has become a surrogate for all letters in the alphabet, presenting a universal yet unreadable language.  This simplified system allows Quinn to explore the distance between reading and seeing.

Using specific chapters as sources,  the work sometimes transforms Melville’s writings into labyrinthine and spiraling compositions that call to mind Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal quest for the White Whale, as in the glorious and dark “Chapter 35 or 2,128 times E”.  Other times, the composition takes on a more schematic, almost geometric approach, as in the three large pieces on view, which are the focal point of the new exhibition, and which vividly convey a direct visual rendering of the chapter in question.  “Chapters 4 to 9 or 35,637 times E”, with its interlocked and tightly knitted Es, is strongly evocative both of the loving embrace in which Ishmael finds himself upon waking up, and of the tangle between the patchwork quilt and Queequeg's arm: “The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles…this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt.” 

The imposing 44” x 30” two-part piece “Chapter 9 or 1,196 times E” and “Chapter 9 or 1,676 times E” (The Sermon) by contrast, reveals an almost onomatopoeic connotation. The wateriness and billowy quality of the ink in these two works brilliantly conjure a visual rendering of the passages which inspired them: “…and all the watery world of woe bowled over him”, or “Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale!”

As the novel “Moby Dick” is considered as a stylistic example of alliteration, allusion, similes, and metaphors, so we can say about Quinn’s works, and markedly so, as the alliteration in his work is absolute, while we see the transformation of a classic text into strings of letterforms that are at once majestic and impulsive.

Since 1999, Quinn's works on paper have been included in over eighty exhibitions, both national and international.  His teaching, his exhibitions, and his role as a moderator and panelist at national conferences currently make Quinn one of the most brilliant figures in printmaking.