NYAB Event - Greg Lindquist "Nonpasts"

This event has ended.
At Elizabeth Harris Gallery
Media: Painting, Sculpture, Installation

The Elizabeth Harris Gallery presents “Nonpasts,” an exhibition of recent paintings, sculpture, installation and works on paper by Greg Lindquist. While previously Lindquist has focused on the location and material-specific character of his paintings, he has recently begun to think about issues these sites evoke in a larger, more conceptual and historical context. As a negation of “past” and evoking the spaces in between tenses, “nonpast” recalls ideas of interstitial space such as Robert Smithson's ideas of non-sites and Rosalind Kraus's expansion of the forms and spaces defining boundaries of landscape, sculpture and architecture. In Lindquist's various depictions of architectural ruins (as near as Brooklyn and as far as the former Soviet Bloc country Georgia), “nonpasts” refer to a rich ambiguity of states, tenses and forms. While some architecture appears in a state of natural decomposition and abandonment of use, others suggest decaying incompletion or human-directed disassembly. In these temporal gray areas the dialectics of interior-exterior, complete-incomplete, new-old, value-valueless, and use-neglect dissolve and blur.

Reconsidering painting displayed as a discrete object at eye level, Lindquist has hung arrangements of clusters that suggest a presence of a grid and call attention to the paintings' edges and the spaces around them. The paintings become modules with which to play—slotting them together, pulling them apart. One might imagine them as hovering fragments of an incomplete modular system. Examining the role of photography as a source material, Lindquist explores the photograph as the obsessive segmenting of the world and the viewfinder as another kind of grid. In painting these views, distilled and reduced into their essential forms, he calls to mind the nature of memory as imperfect recollections of the mind.

The exhibition “Nonpasts” also marks Lindquist's exploration into sculpture. Creating over a dozen concrete boxes and indexical casts of its footprint, these sculptures call to mind funerary monuments, architectural columns, pedestals or coffins. In their serial forms and material sameness, Lindquist alludes to the minimalism of Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, yet in their rough-hewn materials and character he acknowledges incompleteness and disorder.

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