"Strange Lens: Three Painters" Exhibition
Airplane
This event has ended.
The exhibition features works by Hilary Doyle, Dan Herr, and Mike Olin. These artists explore a territory between abstraction and figuration, and who present an idiosyncratic approach to art-making. All three are driven more by a mysterious inner logic than by aesthetic or narrative aims. These works do not ask for the viewer’s admiration, but rather exert their own strange perspective.
Hilary Doyle’s work focuses on perversely uninteresting objects such as plastic shopping bags, stepped-on gum, broken twigs, and mud, which are realized as painterly bas-reliefs. Her work presents visions of the world such as a square of cracked sidewalk, or a mixture of litter and weeds in dirt, that are deliberately banal, jarring the viewer’s expectations of what representational painting ought to represent. Her process involves creating replicas of objects such as a Dunkin Donuts coffee cup, or a Ziploc bag, with acrylic paint, then pealing these likenesses from her palette and applying them to her compositions. Her paintings feel at once whimsically hand-made and deliberately anti-aestheticized, like tender portraits of the places we step on or over on our way to something more important.
Dan Herr’s work feels like a comic book in which all the characters are paint. The paint jumps, drips, puddles, fights with other paint, all within structures built of paint. Sometimes the marks form themselves into recognizable things, such as a bicycle or an alligator. Every mark seems to have its own will, crowding one another out to vie for dominance. His complex, unpredictable compositions seem less the realization of careful planning and more the by-product an idiosyncratic process. Herr’s work recalls abstract mid-century painters in its scale and focus on gesture, but departs from the bombast of this era in favor of a nervous, scrawling search.
At first glance Mike Olin’s paintings are abstractions filled with scratched and smeared gestures layered with bits of trash and found objects. Upon closer inspection, the paintings are actually full of cryptic symbols and images that reflect the artist’s conceptual and spiritual musings. Often, Olin repeats imagery in painting after painting, such as the image of a pinball game, a spider, the Big Dipper, or pairs of sunglasses. These images often have a metaphorical, even mystical meaning to the artist. Olin camouflages and obfuscates these images and objects with layers of paint, layering meaning, time, and space so that his intentions are somewhat inscrutable. The viewer is invited to draw his or her own conclusions, by uncovering new narratives from his densely layered introspective process.
Media
Schedule
from January 25, 2013 to February 24, 2013