For Immediate Release

Artist:                            June Wayne

Exhibition:                Cognitos, 1984

Dates:  September 10 – October 24, 2009

Reception:               Thursday September 10, 2009 from 6 to 8 pm

Khastoo Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by June Wayne from the Cognitos series, begun in 1960 and completed in 1984.  A reception for the artist will be held on Thursday September 10th, from 6 to 8pm.

With the support of the Ford Foundation, June Wayne opened Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles in 1960.  Expanding the boundaries of the medium, Wayne helped to revitalize the role of paper arts in the U.S., gaining international recognition as an “incontestable pioneer of contemporary lithography” [ - Jorge de Sousa]. That same year, Wayne commissioned the accomplished papermaker Douglass Howell to construct a series of highly textured large-scale canvases, composed of a mixture of gesso, gelatin, and multiple layers of paper. These weighty, almost bas-relief surfaces, were purposed as topographical base maps, to be molded, hacked at, carved, and restructured.  Their durability and sublimation proved to be a phenomenological challenge to Wayne and the artist spent nearly a quarter of a century working on these panels, painting and repainting some (as in the celebrated Sixti-Sexate, 1968 which later became Anki, 1984) and destroying others.  Like the irritant that creates a pearl, what went into the Cognitos was a tenaciously laborious and unrelenting devotion to teasing out intermediaries of flawlessness and defect.  The results, finally finished in 1984, are a series of brilliant and complex gems that uproot metaphors for the human psyche in dazzling landscapes of black, red, silver and gold.

The term “cognitos” plays on paradigmatic existential expression (cogito or consciousness) and more familiar cognition (going back to source, the product of these processes), integrated and grouped into a plural. This body of work then marks both a teleological endgame to the original textured abstractions (the last of the Howell panels), and the crescendo of a new discovery of planetary presence, both within and without.  Each work teases out the in-betweens, to discover a ‘new’ experience or understanding hidden away in the peripheries of memory and recognized relationships. The Cognitos, with their reflective terrain of particularized built-up color and boundless perimeters, literally delineate a series of spatial events, to be exposed to physically in perspectival totality, through shifting daylight and passing time.  And as much as their iconic quality reflects messianic distance, illusion and Ganzfeld perceptive sensations, the ebb and flow of personal and private knowledge perfectly grounds each moment into everyday reality. Here the cosmos mirror nature, vice-versa, and beyond; heterogenous self-examination pervades as we reenter our Platonic cave and beat out a shadow above the Minimal and Radical.

June Wayne was born in 1918 in Chicago.  At age fifteen, she dropped out of high school to become an artist and quickly became a regular in a pre-war circle of avant-garde writers, actors, artists and scientists.  By 1938, Wayne joined the WPA Easel Project and has since gone on to receive dozens of awards and multiple honorary doctorates. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco (1956); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1959); Cincinnati Art Museum (1969, Retrospective).  Public collections include Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago. and Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris.  In 2002 Rutgers University established the June Wayne Archive and Study Center and in 2007 published a Catalogue Raisonné of her works from 1936-2006.  She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.