Thinking Positive

Richie Culver & Philip Newcombe Thinking Positive Standing here you are composed of things. You carry a charge. It can go either way. Around you are items and ideas. They oscillate around their sense of self and other. Enigmatic sign posts that curl from beyond one horizon toward another. Water that describes the shape of enterprise cannot escape the world. Standing here you are composed of time. You carry a charge. It can go either way. The work of Richie Culver is a vehicle for direction, or a certain thrusting mischievous misdirection. The pieces here pretend to guide the mind from the edge of one idea to the other in the shortest possible distance. Their explicit message is maybe not the purpose. Beyond the pointing finger, the confident scale, the exuberant strokes, there lies an immaterial otherness which somehow defines the real and imagined self. The viewer is challenged to meander between two ideas, to read the lines, disregard the map and go between. The work of Philip Newcombe carries secrecy and magic in plain view. The pieces here require audiences to participate in a kind of existential yoga. There is spatial certainty. The limit of reach is acknowledged in pursuit of the limitless. The space becomes uncertain. Time is measured in a new amorphous method. In pretending to do almost nothing a simple gesture rewards with everything. The audience is invited to draw a line at the place where process begins and ends, and in this quest other things are answered. Together the works carry an individual and collective charge, they oscillate around their sense of self and other. Thinking Positive registers what is happening and what is not happening. Andrew Shaw