NYAB Event - Valeri Larko and Trevor Young “Exit the Freeway”

Valeri Larko and Trevor Young “Exit the Freeway”

J. Cacciola Gallery

This event has ended.

Valeri Larko is a landscape painter who is drawn to the urban fringe. It is within the jumble of rusting industrial sites, and aging infrastructure on the outskirts of our cities that she uncovers stories about the everyday world around us, stories that reflect how we have changed and continue to change the environment.

Painting on location, she spends hours roaming an area to find something a spot that resonates with her; then returns to that site many times in the course of making a painting. The process of painting on location is crucial to her working method as it allows her to form a deeper connection to a particular place through careful observation and personal interaction with the people she meets while there.

Although her paintings are highly detailed, the goal is not to duplicate everything exactly, but instead to capture the essence of a particular place and time.

What most would barely notice, anonymous structures, Trevor Young sees as an alternate way of experiencing place. For Young the places that we pass without noticing become destinations. His paintings are the result of years of paying careful attention to the things and places the rest of us are happy to ignore – gas stations, fast food restaurants, and airline terminals among others. They are places that are contained in our transit from here to there, that are on the fringes of our perception and that he enshrines with a luscious painterly quality that belies the stark sense of the real in the paintings themselves.

Young’s relationship with these non-places is complex. By working in a traditional medium, oil paint, his work suggests a history that the places he paints were specifically made to lack. His work is a reminder that these places are found almost anywhere and are likely to be identical where ever they are found. But captured within his work these anonymous places become something much more than they ever could be in real life. Having simultaneously a reverent and snap-shot quality, Young’s paintings present us with a picture of the contradictions that make up much of contemporary life.

[image: Trevor Young “Introduction to the Pump” (2013) oil on canvas 48 x 48 in.]