Brad Nelson "Even Mountains Cast Shadows"

frosch & portmann

poster for Brad Nelson "Even Mountains Cast Shadows"

This event has ended.

frosch&portmann presents “Even Mountains Cast Shadows”, Brad Nelson’s first solo exhibition in New York.

The invisibility and intangibility of faith and the reliance on language to convince someone to believe, instead of direct phenomenological observations, is a prevalent theme in Brad Nelson’s work. Having grown up in Kentucky, Nelson was surrounded by vocal religious convictions and absolute faith-based belief. His artwork creates a vivid visual language in the form of artificial landscapes and paintings of handwritten notes that hover close to nature and attempt to destruct or obscure the sense of what came before. As mountains and rock formations are very influential on the surrounding landscape, ideas and beliefs similarly loom over our contemporary environment.

Nelson moved to northern Arizona in 2008 and his experience in the southwest inspired him to use mountains as the conceptual platform for this show. While the mountains in Brad Nelson’s oils don’t exist in nature, they do exist as a physical manifestation before he paints them. He creates the model first in his studio as sculptures made from raw pigments using a variety of sculpting tools, such as rulers, razor blades, straws, and paper. The artist is using elements of the earth to create artificial constructions of natural landscapes.

During the opening reception of the exhibition, the artist will create a new work through a performance. Nelson will work publicly in the gallery in the same manner that he normally works in the privacy of his studio. He will sculpt a mountain still life, which will function as the origin of the image presented in the new painting. Nelson will then paint on a stage consisting of an unfinished stretched canvas representing an aerial view of the neighborhood where frosch&portmann is located.

Viewers will have the opportunity to observe the original and the reproduction. Once the painting is finished the sculpture will be positioned behind the wall on which the finished painting will hang, so the original event will now be invisible. The reproduction will be the new authority in which faith will be placed and transmitted to the viewer.

Brad Nelson lives and works in Falmouth, Massachusetts. He received his B.A. from the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY and his M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/ Tufts University.

[Image: Brad Nelson "EMCS #7" oil on canvas 11 x 14 in.]

Media

Schedule

from January 12, 2012 to February 26, 2012

Opening Reception on 2012-01-12 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Brad Nelson

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