STEPHEN EICHHORN: Voidground

Secrist | Beach is pleased to announce Chicago-based artist Stephen Eichhorn's exhibition Voidground, his third solo show with Secrist | Beach. 

Stephen Eichhorn's art practice revolves around the deceptively simple plant by exploring a range of dichotomies located within its physical and spiritual properties. Intricately cut out images of grasses, cacti, succulents and blooming flowers are placed, piled and arranged on colorful paper, board, and aluminum creating new forms that offer meditations on consciousness and time. Using design elements and materials sourced from botany textbooks and other publications, these works on paper and panel heighten our connection to the natural and man-made climates that surround us. 

Voidground introduces another element in the figure-ground principle, a compositional device that guides dimensional understanding in images. In addition to the foreground, middle ground or background on a two-dimensional plane - which triggers the viewers focus on the composition by alluding to a third dimension - "voidground" which puts the void front and center (or behind) as a perceptual device that metaphorically alludes to liminal space. These voids, or portals, share the surface with flora to create focal points that simultaneously herald absence and presence. This complicated dimensionality can create a visceral response while also encouraging a closer look and, perhaps, self-exploration. 

With Voidground, the binding visual element is color, which as a descriptive tool, represents a variety of emotional complexities that can be shared by many but felt individually. As an origin story, it could be argued that the color wheel itself can be traced back to the organization of nature: flora. And it is from this point of view, that Eichhorn's exploration of temporality, or the state of existing within our earthly life, evolves. From dark, light, familiar and warming to the bright, reflective, strange and visceral, color's role in these artworks reflects the world around us, just as it exists in the pigments of plants. 

Voidground invites the viewer on a journey of self-awareness with the void as transition, color as guide and flora as bond. This artwork encourages long, slow looks from the individual in order to discover their own path through the multi-dimensional complexities that parallels our own moment in time. Where else but situated in the wonders of nature can we find a level of transparency that can only be truly revealed with patience and understanding.

Stephen Eichhorn (b. 1984, United States) lives and works in Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at the Franklin Park Conservatory, Elmhurst Art Museum and the Chicago Athletic Association. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Tower Hill Botanic Gardens, the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, NEIU Fine Arts Center Gallery, Illinois State Museum Lockport Gallery and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.