Corse is recognized as a notable member of the 1960s Light and Space Movement of Southern California-based artists whose work is unified by their investigation into the circumstances of perception. Though Corse often worked on the periphery of her male counterparts, her deep exploration of the physical experience of seeing, and later the implications of perception in a metaphysical sense, have aligned her with artists such as Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Douglas Wheeler. What makes Corse’s work unique among her Light and Space peers is her painterly approach and embrace of visible brushwork, as well as her strict adherence to paint as a medium. While others turned to architectural pursuits to achieve immersive installations and environments, Corse has remained committed to phenomenological pursuits via unique combinations of paint, reflective material, and the canvas, which she considers an abstracted dimensional field.
Primary to Corse’s practice is her understanding of sight as a subjective experience. This theory manifested in her work during the late 1960s with her use of white acrylic paint layered with microspheres, the tiny glass beads used to illuminate road dividers on a highway. Corse discovered the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of the material after testing various electrical devices to embed lighting within her painting. The painting is thus activated once a person stands in front of it, where differences in light conditions or movement around the canvas create variance within the piece. Together, the combination of materials and colors presents an opportunity for the viewer to confront an externalized reproduction of the act of seeing, where the representation of vision is manifest through Corse’s manipulation of light and color.
Black first entered Corse’s work during the 1970s. Corse found that incorporating light-reflecting, tiny acrylic squares within the all-black palette, often classified by the absence of light, achieved luminescence. The resulting pictorial plane, though rendered minimally, gives the illusion of deep space. The combination of alternating black-and-white bands and grids results in further optical illusion, where the borders between the colors appear to shift or glow. Furthering the potential of these pairings, her new series of smaller Untitled (DNA Series) paintings are grouped in twos as inverse couplings that make up representative segments of the larger painting from which they derive. This installation thus offers both macro and micro perspectives of optical phenomena, which Corse relates to the so-called uncertainty principle, the basis of quantum mechanics that is an area of personal study for the artist. The principle states that the exact location and velocity of any particle in space is unknowable, as a measurement of either affects the outcome of the other, an apropos metaphor for Corse’s exploration of objective reality as altered by subjective awareness.
Source: Lehmann Maupin
Corse is recognized as a notable member of the 1960s Light and Space Movement of Southern California-based artists whose work is unified by their investigation into the circumstances of perception. Though Corse often worked on the periphery of her male counterparts, her deep exploration of the physical experience of seeing, and later the implications of perception in a metaphysical sense, have aligned her with artists such as Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Douglas Wheeler. What makes Corse’s work unique among her Light and Space peers is her painterly approach and embrace of visible brushwork, as well as her strict adherence to paint as a medium. While others turned to architectural pursuits to achieve immersive installations and environments, Corse has remained committed to phenomenological pursuits via unique combinations of paint, reflective material, and the canvas, which she considers an abstracted dimensional field.
Primary to Corse’s practice is her understanding of sight as a subjective experience. This theory manifested in her work during the late 1960s with her use of white acrylic paint layered with microspheres, the tiny glass beads used to illuminate road dividers on a highway. Corse discovered the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of the material after testing various electrical devices to embed lighting within her painting. The painting is thus activated once a person stands in front of it, where differences in light conditions or movement around the canvas create variance within the piece. Together, the combination of materials and colors presents an opportunity for the viewer to confront an externalized reproduction of the act of seeing, where the representation of vision is manifest through Corse’s manipulation of light and color.
Black first entered Corse’s work during the 1970s. Corse found that incorporating light-reflecting, tiny acrylic squares within the all-black palette, often classified by the absence of light, achieved luminescence. The resulting pictorial plane, though rendered minimally, gives the illusion of deep space. The combination of alternating black-and-white bands and grids results in further optical illusion, where the borders between the colors appear to shift or glow. Furthering the potential of these pairings, her new series of smaller Untitled (DNA Series) paintings are grouped in twos as inverse couplings that make up representative segments of the larger painting from which they derive. This installation thus offers both macro and micro perspectives of optical phenomena, which Corse relates to the so-called uncertainty principle, the basis of quantum mechanics that is an area of personal study for the artist. The principle states that the exact location and velocity of any particle in space is unknowable, as a measurement of either affects the outcome of the other, an apropos metaphor for Corse’s exploration of objective reality as altered by subjective awareness.
Source: Lehmann Maupin
