Rob Swainston "Centennial Drift"
BravinLee Programs
This event has ended.
Rob Swainston mixes installation, printmaking, sculpture, drawing and video in an exploration of social and historical processes. Because Swainston works large and in multiples he can cut up, overprint, combine, repeat and reassemble work in multiple ways. He is constantly rebuilding and reassembling work while adding new components and destroying old. For him, this process is analogous to how our social world is constructed.
Centennial Drift is an exploration of contemporary American political and social landscape 100 years after the ‘closing of the American frontier.’ The show consists of three components: a large woodblock Centennial, smaller collage-drawings Drifts, and a video/print juxtaposition, Arch.
When the American Western Frontier was declared ‘closed’ a century ago, the event was greeted with a certain unease among historians and political actors, stemming from a perception that the frontier served an important distraction from the political machinations of real power relations. Adrift in the ‘American Century’ that followed, the frontier has been replaced variously by global empire, mass media, consumerism, the cold war, the space race, the space age, and, more recently globalization and the digital frontier.
Centennial, a large woodblock print mural spanning three walls in the main gallery is a black and white print, derived from a jigsaw block of distressed, cut and reassembled plywood printed on heavy watercolor paper. It acts as a vacant stage that once possessed the expansive hope of the American frontier and now has been reduced to an empty wall—a ‘post-landscape landscape’, at once evoking historiography, topography and cosmology.
Drifts, a series of smaller print/collage/drawings loaded with fragmented content, accumulated from the lost hope and aspirations of the ‘American Century’, contain like snowdrifts, unlikely accumulations of images that can be mentally placed or projected onto the vacant landscape of Centennial.
The video/print installation, Arch reveals the nature of the spectacle of political machinations, and the robust reproduction of power structures. The departure point for Arch is a large 16th century multi-woodblock print by Albrecht Durer, Triumphal Arch. The original print featured interchangeable panels in an architectural armature. The panels, functioning as propaganda, could be removed, replaced, or relocated depending upon political necessity and imperial whim. Arch is a redrawn, reconfigured, and updated Triumphal Arch positioned within the context of American Spectacle.
[Image: Rob Swainston "Centennial" (2009-2010) woodblock on paper, Room installation, 10 x 3 ft. ]
Media
Schedule
from February 05, 2010 to March 13, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-02-05 from 18:00 to 20:00