14 September 2007 through 14 October 2007
Reception Thursday September 13 2007, 7-9pm
Curated by Adam Harrison
Works on Painting features three artists that deal with the physical and visual aspects of paint through the utilization of three different mediums - painting, sculpture and photography.
Ben Reeves' paintings of people smoking utilize a relatively flat surface to depict the figures, while the smoke they are producing is represented by almost sculpturally thick blobs of paint, protruding from the canvas. Here the fleeting, ethereal nature of smoke is replaced by a dense, physical mass of oil paint.
Rebecca Donald's "towels" are sculptures created by thickly pouring oil paint mixed with oil onto canvas. When dried, the paint creates a tactile surface that strongly resembles terrycloth towels. Folded or strewn on the floor, the sculptures eschew the illusionistic space of painting in favour of the emulative nature of representational sculpture, albeit through the use of processes and materials inextricably linked to the medium of painting.
A Palette from the Artist's Studio by Evan Lee, shows the underside of a transparent palette used by the artist for his own paintings. "Photographed" by a desktop scanner, the picture shows the accidental traces made while mixing paints for actual paintings. Though the picture resembles an abstract painting - the paint marks recall the gestural brushwork of Robert Rauschenberg or Cy Twombly - it is indeed an accurate representation of physical traces of the painting process.
Though working is different mediums, all three artists engage with the act of applying paint to a surface, highlighting this action's relationship to depiction and considering it in relation to the
production of art in general.
