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Off the Edge: Works by Gallery Artists
November 19, 2008 – January 3, 2009 (Tues-Fri 10-6; Sat 11-5:30)
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Paul Critchley |
Scott Richards Contemporary Art presents Off the Edge, a group exhibition that explores the space beyond the rectangle. In many ways, the rectangular shape of the traditional painting or photograph is an arbitrary choice, but for the artists in this exhibition, the only boundary is the idea. Working in both realism and abstraction in a variety of media, they challenge traditional ideas of shape, surface, illusion and meaning.
Paul Critchley and Daniel Douke create paintings that shift between image and object. In Critchley’s quirky pieces, the shape of the canvas exactly echoes the shape of the painted subject. With works ranging from a lifelike security camera mounted high on the wall to a pair of giant binoculars revealing a double ocean landscape, the paintings become curious and surreal sculptural objects. Daniel Douke pushes the boundaries of oil on canvas, perfectly recreating cardboard, metal and plywood commercial product packaging in three dimensions. Complete with dents, scuffs, and lurid logos, his works combine mundane imagery with exquisite painting technique and we are made to see the beauty and humor in icons of global consumerism.
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Jeremy Kidd |
Both Warner Friedman’s and Jeremy Kidd’s irregularly shaped works examine the landscape, using heightened perspective and multiple dimensions to disorient and involve the viewer. Friedman’s canvases present architectural portals to serene countryside. With dramatic plays of shadow and light, they appear to project beyond the surface of the wall and into another dimension, inviting us to step through into the landscape beyond. Kidd’s large-scale urban photo collages emerge from a complicated patchwork of hundreds of digital pictures, each taken as the light and weather change over an extended period of time in a chosen place. A more visceral experience of the landscape is produced through this process, closer to the way we actually catch glimpses of and interpret our own surroundings.
In the case of Patrick Hughes and Eric Zammitt, the line between sculpture and painting is blurred. Hughes manipulates space and the laws of perspective with his three-dimensional painted wood constructions of interiors and exteriors. By reversing the apparent perspective in the subject matter, multiple points of view are presented simultaneously from the various surfaces, giving the works a sense of paradoxical motion. Zammitt’s wall constructions are made of thousands of colored bits of acrylic plastic, laminated into cohesive panels through an intensive process. The shape of the works can inform their meaning, as in TV quadrascape, which is reminiscent of the shape of a retro television set. Smooth as glass, Zammitt’s surfaces are a mesmerizing array of pulsating colors that rhythmically shift and shimmer as the light changes throughout the day. |
