At Coral Springs Museum, a Minimalist, Monochrome Sanctuary

Is white a coloration, or is white the absence of coloration? The inside design trade would say it’s the previous; Benjamin Moore alone affords greater than 150 shades of white, from Minced Onion to Mayonnaise. (Scanning the paint aisle at House Depot typically makes me hungry.)

I might assume that Jessie Laura, the northern California artist at the moment exhibiting solo on the Coral Springs Museum of Artwork (“Visible Whispers,” working by way of Aug. 13), believes it’s the latter. Whereas I can’t inform you if Laura deploys Chantilly Lace or White Dove varieties, she solely makes use of white.

The artist’s m.o. is as monochrome as it’s minimalist—stripped naked of coloration, of illustration, of pretension. Inevitably, her geometrically exact mixed-media works and site-specific installations mix with the white pillars and partitions of the gallery, in order that all the room carries of the air of a bridal sanctum or a meditation retreat. It’s the artwork world, a neighborhood typically related to razzle and dazzle, confronted with a Zenlike reductionism. “Visible Whispers” is such a frill-free exhibition that when Laura deploys mirrors in her incandescent work “Leap,” it appears like an extravagant materials addition. Don’t be stunned if, whilst you’re perusing the exhibit, you discover that your coronary heart fee has slowed.

Laura’s work might be inscrutable in its rigor, conjuring the ground installations of Carl Andre and the visually difficult Op Artwork improvements of the Sixties. What to make of “Sol’s Grid,” with its 60 or so equivalent posts cryptically sprouting from the hardwood ground of the museum like ears of corn? We fumble for visible clues from on a regular basis life among the many artist’s squares inside squares and circles inside circles.

“Nothingness however shining,” arguably Laura’s magnum opus on this exhibition, options hundreds of painted wood nubs forming a circle on the wall, some tightly packed, others unfold out. It could possibly be an atom or a planet, however no matter it’s, it carries a cosmic heft, and it performs the kind of methods on the attention usually facilitated by psychedelic substances. Hold watching it, and the person fragments wriggle and throb. In “Nothingness I,” its shapely cousin introduced below LED gentle, the nubs appear to be dancing.

Implacable as they typically are, Laura’s installations will not be essentially devoid of caprice. In “Wave,” an undulating collection of rings rising from a wall, I detected a curvy Slinky—a childhood toy distilled to its essence and frozen in mid-use.

A 3-minute video of Laura exploring and explaining her course of is included in “Visible Whispers,” and it reveals that she practices what she preaches. Her studio, too, is all white. So are her clothes and the frames of her glasses, suggesting that colorlessness is a life-style in addition to an inventive follow.

Van Gogh famously noticed colours that weren’t there, and painted the feverish, impossibly vibrant world that existed in his thoughts. Laura takes away the colours that are there for an equally idealized imaginative and prescient. With the distractions of visible noise filtered out, the result’s a cocoon of tranquility.

“Visible Whispers” runs by way of Aug. 13 at Coral Springs Museum of Artwork. Admission is free. The museum is open Tues.-Thurs. from 9 a.m. to eight:30 p.m., and Mon., Fri. and Sat. from 9 a.m. to five:30 p.m. For data, name 954/340-5000 or go to coralspringsmuseum.org.

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