"in the time of not yet," Chris Mona Solo Projects and Collaborative Projects with Helen Frederick, Rice Gallery, McDaniel College, Westminster, Fall 2024
“in the time of not yet” features solo projects in printmaking, egg tempera painting, and assisted readymades. These works investigate the struggle to transcend consumer culture and find deeper connections. Mona’s 25-color lithograph “Ur Barrow” has dual sources in re-imagining sugary cereal and the advertising campaigns aimed at the innocent; as well as transforming an ornate Renaissance platter in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, which was festooned with imagery from the Book of Revelation.
In the work that is shared between Mona and Helen Frederick, we use cultural touchstones from across time and space that move us personally. On view will be two bodies of printmaking works on paper:
Works from the 2023 series “The Stone Seeker / Prescient Heart,” investigates the notion of inspiration and truth seeking. The work challenges the myth of the solo artist as someone who operates in isolated independence, and demonstrates the source of intuitive visual exchanges. Frederick’s investigation of witness and remembrance and Mona’s belief in the elasticity of time and space are wedded in multivalent images. A Catherine Wheel also conjures a dharma wheel, while Dadaist stone glasses confront a Yoruba Ori Inu, or “Inner Head.” This series features two large scale books, plus editioned and singular works in multi media printmaking.
Works from the 2024 series ”Resonance and Resistance: Towards a Home Unbound,” explore war and conflict, with the potential for resolution. Much of this series has as its matrix Helen Frederick’s lush and tactile handmade paper. Frederick’s custom made paper is imprinted with collaboratively-inspired images of boulders as mountain refuges, and sites of both enlightenment, and pestilent war.
On view in “in the time of not yet” are this series’ side projects, featuring lithography, screen print, and woodcut printed on tinted and black papers. “Mosaic in Black and Red: In Search of Sacred Geometry,” acknowledges dark times, but is imbued with hope in the transformative interactions of Frederick’s linear but expressive geometry, with ogee images from Indigenous Mississippian culture. A powerful woodcut of an arm cuts through a surround of beautiful but pestilent golden flies. With the paper understood as body, male and female arms appear as reliquaries of power, resistance, and change. Mona’s assisted readymade featuring weeds woven into a victory wreath suggests the triumph of desolation.