26.02 – 22.03.2014
A solo exhibition by Tahiti Pehrson
Tahiti Pehrson spent his early years without electricity growing up in a bohemian artist household in Northern California. Art was a mode of entertainment without television or music and long hours were spent in nature and drawing. Influenced by the burgeoning skateboarding and punk scene of the mid Nineteen-eighties and later engaging in the San Francisco street art and graffiti culture of the late Nineties. Traveling Europe and China in search of art enrichment and later attending the San Francisco Art Institute as a painting major, Pehrson left after a year and a half. A practice of stencil-making and street art evolved into a more and more detailed practice of paper cutting two and three-dimensional works.
Pehrson has been working and exhibiting in hand cut paper for the last fifteen years. Over the last five plus years his works have concentrated on highly detailed geometric patterns called Guilloche which date back to Classical Greek and Roman times, later to be perfected by the Rose Engine Lathe in France in the late 1700’s. Today these patterns can be seen on almost every currency in the world as well as hub cups watches and also seem to touch on the design sense intrinsic to nature. These highly detailed monochromatic works create with light and shadow a hypnotic field of Moire patterning.
With many intersections creating a larger fabric, themes in the work center around Connectivity, Systems, Variation and fragility.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
For as long as I can remember I have used art to define and document my experiences. The inexactness of outcome always suited me and yet my work has evolved more and more towards exactness. In the process of cutting more and more detailed works I started to become aware of variation and indeed of repetition. Each shape morphing from square to diamond to triangle, and each variation leading to the next, all forming a larger fabric and pattern. A system connected. Our world is often defined by our differences rather than the reality of parts of a whole. I became interested in the things that make us the same. Even if art is reduced only to a visual experience, trying to create an experience that could both inspire and suggest a wide variety of narratives. The viewer is invited to tailor his/her own experience, and thus engaging personally. A person of faith may read and interpret religious or spiritual implications while a more scientifically minded individual could see Geometry yet both narratives describe a larger system encompassing a whole. There is a tension, which exists between the apparent fragility of the medium played against the strength of connectivity in a radiant fabric of variation.
ARTWORKS:
_____________________________________________
INTERVIEW:
Courtesy of / copyright of Juxtapoz
_____________________________________________
_____________________________________________
TAHITI PEHRSON DOCUMENTARY – TRAILER
During February 2014, we were blessed to host a solo exhibition by Tahiti Pehrson. While the artist and his travel companion were in Cape Town, they filmed part of a documentary on Tahiti’s career as artist and his passion for skateboarding, as well as the ways in which people are universally connected, hence the name of his solo exhibition, Connectivity. Watch the beautifully crafted trailer here, which features music by Bilderberg Motel.
Thank you Adrian Day of Baseline.