"Helene Mukhtar"

Mukhtar in her collages takes on the challenge of arranging the disparate into neat, fastidious compositions. What her exact rules are, the viewer is not privy to, but there does seem to be the presence of rules. Planes and perspectives are experimented with and objectivity is blurred, much like in a cubist painting. Mukhtar's use of negative space lends to her work added complexity and allows her to explore the beauty of geometry and rigidity with greater depth. In her "Harmony" series, Mukhtar searches for the inconspicuous order within decontextualized architectural imagery and fragments of a musical score. She writes that it is "an attempt to reconcile and join two geometrical symbols, the circle and the line." Extending and playing on the themes of the cut-out images with oil paint is one method she uses to achieve this unity, giving rise to, or perhaps just emphasizing, another conflict: that of liberty versus constraint. Painting gives the artist greater flexibility in expression, but this flexibility is mitigated by the physics dictated by the cut-outs. A music score, which instructs a musician, but unavoidably allows interpretation, is an apt symbol for this drama. To further heighten reconciliation, the images in these collages do not only overlap, but intersect, so that one image is incorporated into the other.

-Eugene Hwang