undone:
Brian Cypher & Damien Hoar de Galvan
January 11 – February 22, 2025What is it to be undone? Your shoelaces can be undone, one has become undone. As a kid, if I said, “I’m done,” at the dinner table, my step-mother would retort, “Roast beef is done, you’re finished.” Her comment left me feeling undone when I was told I was finished. What is finished? Final, complete, being done and then to be undone. The unraveling begins…
For its first exhibition in 2025 studio e is thrilled to present undone: Brian Cypher and Damien Hoar de Galvan’s second two person show with the gallery. Both artists collage and manipulate materials using soft geometric abstraction to undo themselves, structures, and even, perhaps, reality. Cypher deconstructs old work shirts, unfolding and laying flat the essence of labor. Hoar de Galvin cuts, paints and puzzles together blocks of wood examining the essence of color, form, and abstraction and I would argue the life of the mind. His wooden block collages are evocative: a world, a head, a tree, a rock, a cross section of a brain and all its cavernous mysteries. Cypher separates the seams of garments worn for work and we may imagine the humans who made and wore these blue shirts. Did they work in a factory, at the auto shop, or did they sit at a computer? Unstitching, undoing, removing the function from the clothing, flattening - we wonder - who did these clothes fit? What were their lives? What is our life? Are we made of memories from the things we have touched? Threads and strings, blocks and cuts, seams torn, lives changing and changed, shapes shifted and colored and reconnected - remade. We become Undone and then done and undone again, a cycle of destruction and creation over and over.
In Cypher’s ‘Sprawl’ he lays out the cut shapes of a shirt onto canvas. What was once a shoulder, a collar, a mid section now becomes a sprawling countryside or cool city from above. Axe shapes and panhandles beckon to be held, yet they are flat and adhered. Shades of blue, kind of sad, lonely and yet connected on the edges of existing. Cypher’s pieces remind me of a mix of Nevelson and Bourgeois and I wonder, “What would the Louise's think of these?” Hoar de Galvan uses bits of plywood to provide subtle dimension to his pieces. In ‘good try’ he creates a Tetris like construction of wooden cereal marshmallow charms - aren’t we lucky? His mark making on some blocks genuinely responds to the material, scribbling in one shape like Twombly, urgent, emotional, intentional. A pink bow barrette clipped to a head, a star face, patches of small color pieced together like Klee. These two artists are doing the modern thing in the 21st century and it’s so yummy.
Their art helps guide us through the magic and tragedy of the world. Perhaps parts of this world and its systems really are broken, or is that sense of failure a reflection of perspective? Both artists work to simplify perspective. When viewing a dimensional Hoar de Galvan one could stand facing the color, the shapes, the puzzle, and then move ninety degrees and stand gazing at the cross section - the strange swath of wood one would never know could have such complexity unless viewing from the front. These discarded pieces glued together become new worlds to inhabit. Cypher’s works also invite us to imagine the lives that the garments have held and enabled. They are flattened and end up revealing more dimensions.
Entering the next quarter of the 21st century, super charged with digital technology and its binarily coded oppositional positions, “if one believes blank they then can’t believe in blank” - Cypher and Hoar de Galvan chart another route, they map mysterious detours and pit stops. Let’s do more than tap a screen: linger, wonder, ponder, remember, forget, hold on and let go. The undoing asks us to unfold puzzles to then offer us a way into the puzzle. We can dream new pasts and futures with our memories. As the thread of time frays to lint we are undone in the midst of dust bunnies breaking apart and clumping in delicate fluffles, inevitably creating and destroying fragile possibilities. These works share glimpses of how to perceive the wondrous remains. What is it going to be? To do or undo? - it’s an answer, a question and all the spaces inbetween.
-Erin Shafkind
Brian Cypher is a self-taught artist living and working in the Skagit Valley. Shortly after moving to Anacortes when he was 15, he established an art studio and began painting. Since then Cypher has shown his work throughout the United States and Europe. His artwork is based in formal abstraction that pulls from a multitude of sources including automatic drawing, observing nature and Abstract Expressionism. He finds his imagery through the process of drawing, material investigation and an open-ended approach to allow for a constant flow of ideas, tangents, and detours to occur in the work. Cypher works primarily with drawing, painting and printmaking. His work was recently added to the permanent collection of Microsoft.
Damien Hoar de Galvan was born in Northampton, MA in 1979. Graduating from Green Mountain College in 2001 with a degree in behavioral science he began making art soon after and in 2008 graduated with a post-baccalaureate certificate from the School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Since then he has been living and working around the Boston area and showing throughout the country. In 2019 he was included in 100 Sculptors Of Tomorrow published by Thames & Hudson and in 2020 was featured in New American Painters vol. 146 chosen by Jerry Saltz. Recently Hoar de Galvan has exhibited at the Boston Center for the Arts, Volta Art Fair, Carroll and Sons (Boston), studio e Gallery (Seattle), and Brilliant Champions (Brooklyn).