Casemore Gallery is pleased to present Quantum Foam, an exhibition of new and recent works by Dan Davis, Phillip Maisel, and Henna Vainio.

Quantum Foam includes work in a variety of media — photography, painting, collage, sculpture — that challenge our visual associations with space, how objects appear, and how close observation can change what we see. At a distance, objects may appear flat, the Euclidean limitations of our vision affecting the way we see them and how they occupy space. Up close, however, their appearance changes. A one-to-one, object to self relationship reveals how our perception, like matter in quantum foam, fluctuates in the turbulent nature of spacetime. 
 
Dan Davis’s paintings combine photorealism and abstraction with the architectural feel of late 20th-century living spaces, in which an apartment is more of a “pad,” both modern and comforting, past and future. Well-detailed, hyper-puffy recliners and sleek, minimalist beds float on less-defined surface spaces, not so much in the space as of it, almost dreamlike. Davis questions the “deep human need to replicate our world back to ourselves,” and in that replication, wondering “is it the thing itself, or the idea of it?”
 
Phillip Maisel’s works use sculpture, collage, and photography to confound viewer expectations of representation, space and assumed structure. At a distance, a strong sense of three-dimensional depth and architectural construction prevails. This proves more visually illusory when inspected with closeness and the photographic elements themselves become trompe l'oeil. The viewer’s perception of space shifts and the shapes and images flatten as if constructed with the precision of a camera lucida.
 
Henna Vainio's recent ceramic works focus on language in the form of word stacks. In language, understanding, imagination, and meaning intersect as we read, write, speak, and listen from beginning to end. In Vainio’s word stacks, the linear is disrupted as beginning and end are compressed in spacetime. The message becomes nearly impossible to decipher, but the letters remain with their message becoming nearly infinite. 

Casemore Gallery