ALL I HAVE LEFT IS THE SKY

I N R E V I E W

ALL I HAVE LEFT IS THE SKY

Eileen Cheong’s prints played me like a player piano. Drew Henry, both hair salon and art gallery, is a stimulatingly social setting for viewing art. A cut and style was in process for part of the time I pursued Cheong’s exhibit. As a person interested in the arts infusing all of life — more and more of my life anyway — and as a person fond of new and clever solutions, the combined purposes of the space complement and tease, asking “What about here? What about now?"

Cheong’s artworks are luminous, layered, rhythmic, humble in size and arresting in their color combinations. She dapples lines of ink over each other so they become not just color, but texture. Each swoosh of color is evidence of the breezy movement of her application. They are poetically titled and, above all, musical. Slow to Open, Split Gold, All the King’s Horses, Hot Sauce and Mango — sound like musical compositions and look something like musical scores written in her own form of notation.

Some of Cheong’s prints in this exhibition set are lively and joyous, some stormy, some still. Quite a few seem to reference moments of awe in the natural world — Fire Series, Water Series, Fish Bursts, Spring Dance with the Wind, Blaze, Dragon Scales.

Their easy immersiveness struck me. Our minds are forever trying to find patterns and known things in abstraction, but Cheong’s artworks moved me more like Zen Buddhist koans than Rorschach inkblot tests — bypassing rational process and showing me into a moment.

It’s almost like there’s a form in these works that leaps out from the 2 dimentional, something happens in that interplay between viewer and motion-filled print, the gestural drips like those old instructional footprints placed on the floor in the shape of a dance. It sculpts people and places I’ve been; am; am becoming.

After my first spin around the show, I circled back and finally read the artist’s statement about her work: “Layers of lush sounds [...offer] a listen into the songs within [Cheong’s] mind.” The gentle leading and nudging sense that I felt was as intended. Cheong tells us that “each image carries its own melody to be resolved by the viewer.”

Cheong writes of an “uncertainty of process” as “the press changes the ink painted on the glass.” It is this very rhythm of painting, pushing textures, placing the paper and running it through the press that remains constant even as the outcome becomes unpredictable.

Beneath the Vastness of the Sky is a nourishing body of work. We meet Cheong’s devoted “hands, playing with the drips and the streaks, creating chaos and a ground for us to sink into all at the same time. (Cheong)” In that moment we are held softly beneath the fearsome clanking din of a warped social machine, beneath the crashes or whirring foreground of our personal daily struggles as Cheong feeds paper through her process, letting art become.

Eileen Cheong, Water Series, (image courtesy of the artist)

Eileen Cheong, Blaze, (image courtesy of the artist)

-Tara O’Nay

www.drewhenrysalon.wordpress.com

ALLTHEARTSTL.COM SPRING 2019 IN REVIEW