2. Karen Arm (b. 1962) lives and works in Brooklyn and Shelter
Island, NY. This is her sixth exhibition with P·P·O·W since 1999.
Arm received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 1985, and
while there, spent a semester studying at the Tyler School of Art
in Rome. Arm graduated from Columbia University with an MFA
in 1989. Arm was the managing editor of The Book of Symbols
(Archives for Research in Archetypal Symbolism), published by
Taschen in 2010. In 2002 she received a New York Foundation
for the Arts Award for Painting. Arm’s works were shown in the
United States Embassy in Burma from 2012–16.
3. Darkness Within Light
By Jamie Sterns
What is five years? That depends on the context. It can be an
eternity or it can be a blip. In the context of the universe it is a
sliver of nothing. In the context of someone’s life it can change
everything. Five years is how long it has been since Karen Arm
has had a solo exhibition and in those five years she has lived
life and has produced a new body of work that reflects and
questions what time can mean.
When looking at these new works one might not think too
much has changed for Arm, as they are a continuation of her
oeuvre. She makes paintings and drawings that cull from the
elemental: smoke, earth, water, and stars. And her processes
are extraordinary in the techniques used to create them. She
layers colors and glazes – dozens of them – and builds an almost
reptilian like skin, whose buried luminosity is only revealed with
a final rubbing away of the accumulated layers. The results
are transfixing, the themes subtle; but these are not just pretty
paintings and drawings of the earthly and celestial. They are
abstractions in the highest form as they contain the essence of
their representation. Each line, each point of color, each mark,
is both nothing and everything – both infinite and insignificant.
This duality is what makes Arm’s works timeless and relevant,
as they reflect the condition of existing in both its ceaselessness
and its beauty.
The focuses within this show are her ‘sun’ and ‘radiating
wave’ paintings. They have no obligated title or description
but can be categorized as such for thematic exploration. The
suns are a mass of colored points that in their accumulation,
and the way in which Arm creates them, are transformed into
luminescent orbs. They radiate both inwardly and externally
and feel suspended in zero gravity. Their density is dizzying
and they produce both a feeling of the meditative and the
ecstatic. They are alive and their light hits you in your chest and
guts. They make the room quieter. They make you quieter and
that calm feels both light and heavy. The scale of their effect is
relational to the scale of the works. The larger paintings engulf
you and you find yourself stepping towards and away from
the painting’s surface in order to better understand what is
happening within them and in turn you. The smaller drawings
settle into your head and brain. Each dot is like a neuron and
the luminosity being produced by them are like synapses
connecting and firing.
The radiating wave paintings create similar sensations.
Produced by simple singular waved lines that meet at a central
point, these works pulse and make concentric illusions that
ripple out beyond the picture plane. Taking reference from
Buddhist imagery of a radiating heart, these pieces are a new
iconographic symbol for Arm. The relationship to the body is felt
through the flesh in viewing these works. The feeling of the auric
and the diffusion of energy create an echo like sensation. The
pulsing is multi-directional, self-feeding and is both generative
and devouring.
This sense, of devouring and moments of darkness, is
what complicates Arms paintings and drawings. These are
undoubtedly beautiful, transfixing, and gorgeous works in
their seduction of color and technical feats but they are also
unnerving in what else they expose. The suns hint to this in the
inclusion of dark points, moments within the cluster where there
is an absorbing light source or a void. They seem insignificant
but when you see how they unbalance the perfection of the
whole, they become breaks in the tranquility. They create tears
within the hallucinatory effects of the work but in turn make you
realize that this is in fact a painting and that those marks are
being made one stroke at a time. In the radiating waves, you
sense the momentum of the unrelenting in the pulsations. They
feel like sonic waves that absorb and emanate a never-ending
sound. They consume energy as well as produce a Sisyphean
loop. Both of these reveal that what you are seeing is labor and
time but also that once they have been created they possess
their own life force.
The pieces in the show are also about nature and in turn
the body. The way that they evoke feelings connects them with
sensations within the body and in turn elevates and makes
necessary their aesthetic and technical choices. The colors and
forms are devices in producing these connections and make
them internalized. Like nature, the body is a site of growth and
of decay. The act of living is also the act of dying. Each body
can be seen as a point of light whose glow does not necessarily
4. cease at its expiration. Seeing light/the body only has meaning
in the context of darkness/living. One thing that differentiates
and relativizes this existence is time. The time of living, the
duration and time that light takes to travel within darkness. The
line, the mark, and the dot are the sources of light in Arm’s work
and the passage they travel is the volition of the life of that
light. In this way, light equals bodies and in turn that equals life
and in these works you can feel them breathing. You are in the
presence of something that is alive.
Five years is the amount of time Arm has lived while
creating these works and they are invested with the energy
and force of what that time contained. They exist because the
artist does, but they go beyond just a practice, a new show, or
a new body of work. They are extensions of this life lived but
they are not biographies. They are universal but they are also
abstractions of the symbolic. They are celestial but also about
the flesh. When you look at these works, you do not think about
the artist who made them, you do not think about the five years
that have passed since you may have last seen her works en
masse. Rather, you are reminded that life is deep and long and
that time is relative and eternal.
This is what makes Arm’s works complicated. They are
both pushing and pulling, accumulating and flattening. They
exist because they have to and because they must. They are
reminders that without darkness there can be no light.
Jamie Sterns (b.1981, Seoul, Korea) is based in New York City. She received a BFA
from Rutgers University, New Jersey, and an MA from Goldsmiths University, London.
She is a writer, blogger and curator and co-directs Interstate Projects in Brooklyn,
New York.
images
front cover
Untitled (Yellow and Red Sun on Blue)
2014
acrylic on canvas
48 × 40 inches
inside front cover
Untitled (Yellow-Orange Sun on Red)
2015
watercolor on paper
18 × 15 inches
opposite page
Untitled (Yellow Wavy Ray)
2016
acrylic and watercolor on paper
11 × 9 inches
next page, left
Untitled (Yellow Wavy Ray on Red)
2016
acrylic and watercolor on paper
18 × 15 inches
inside back cover
Untitled (Yellow and Green-Blue Sun on Black-Red)
2015
watercolor on paper
18 × 15 inches
back cover
Untitled (Green and Yellow Sun on Black Red)
2014
acrylic on canvas
48 × 40 inches
inside back flap
Karen Arm in her studio
Photography by and special thanks to
Christopher Gallo
