1275 Minnesota St /
Jack Fischer Gallery
We are pleased to be showing Ward Schumaker’s 6th show in our gallery, translation by the numbers.
As I spend time with the work, letting the images and feelings swirl around in my body and mind, I am left with these words: text, code, musical notations, numbers, Braille, marks, scratches, cryptic, crypto, and prayers all swooping into a concatenation of beat and holy poetry.
If I repeat a word over and over again, it will soon lose its meaning and start to gain something entirely different. It is that “gain” and all the subsequent “gains” where Schumaker’s paintings enter the realm of chants, koans, and song lines.
In these paintings I find an element of meditation and the devotional.
In Ward’s words: “ I’ve long agreed that the reader is the author (and similarly the viewer is the painter) and I’ve always been troubled by the idea that the artist’s intention is necessary to the interpretation of a work, so I’ve preferred to decline explaining my paintings. I find this Ursula K. Le Guin quotation hauntingly relevant: ‘Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it's the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat…where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches’”