GODO CAPTURES THE FUNDAMENTAL DUALITY OF THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE

THE UB POST

EDITION 128 (1376)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014

PAGE 10 ARTS & CULTURE

GODO CAPTURES THE FUNDAMENTAL DUALITY 

OF THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE

By EMMA ELLIS

In her current 976 Art Gallery show, “The Legend of the Swallow” artist D.Bayartsetseg (known  as  Godo) employs the basic unit of art making – the line, the creation of positive and negative space – to pose fundamental questions about our perceptions.

    Godo’s pieces in ‘The Legend of the Swallow” are quite diverse, ranging from a large sheet of paper densely covered in finely inked lines to a suspended white deel (Mongolian traditional costume). But perhaps most striking is the large collection of small sparrow drawings, each in its own frame, arranged side by side in a long line that bends around the gallery space, their sequence suggesting that the swallows arcing across each piece somehow form a narrative.

   
    Godo’s work seems to occupy liminal spaces. Though she tries to make the lines that characterize most of her pieces as straight as possible, when making them, Godo focuses on her breath and heartbeat, and as such, they waver organically. “People always ask what element they are,” says Godo. “But I cannot say if they are wind or water.” A white deel suspended above the floor has a certain ghostly quality, but also has concrete cultural and temporal grounding as a traditional Mongolian garment.

   

   But perhaps most complex and resonant are the narrative-like swallow images. Written narrative, namely Oscar Wilde’s short story, “The Happy Prince” and the poem “A Requiem of the warrior Gilgudei” from Altan Tobchi, was Godo’s source material for this exhibition. Godo is an artist frequently inspired by written work, feeling in it the same energy she seeks to express in her own. In “The Legend of the Swallow,” this is borne out in the ambiguous multiplicity shared by these texts and Godo’s pieces.

    In both “The Happy Prince” and “A Requiem of the warrior Gilgudei” swallows are simultaneously connected with the earthly – death, of the swallow itself and of the body of Chinggis Khaan – and the unearthly, divine charity and the departure of the soul. Our emotional response depends on whether one views those moments that reinforce life’s ephemerality as triumphant or tragic. It is this duality, a fundamental duality of the human experience that Godo has captured in evoking the swallow’s image. As such, “The Legend of the Swallow” is not only a virtuoso experiment in the line, but also in the line between grief and remembrance. 

The exhibition will be open through November 16, at 976 Art Gallery.