Jake Longstreth “Particulate Matter”
Monya Rowe Gallery
This event has ended.
Monya Rowe Gallery presents the first New York City solo exhibition, Particulate Matter, from Los Angeles-based artist Jake Longstreth. This suite of small paintings, depicting anonymous hillsides and mountains, syncretize illusionistic, mimetic traditions of landscape with an off-the-cuff immediacy. Longstreth’s straightforward compositions and tender attention to space and light belie the improvised nature of these works –– done, as they are, without source materials in the studio. The initial familiarity of these landscapes give way to an idiosyncratic mode of mark-making, allowing the eye and mind to tether between abstract and realist tendencies.
Where, precisely, the landscapes depicted in these paintings are remains unclear –– there is a dislocated sense of place here, as Longstreth’s landscapes take as their starting point an omnipresent sense of anxiety. We are aware that the planet is in flux, where precarious relationships can fall quickly off-balance, yet appearances and routines in our day-to-day lives remain, for most of us, largely unchanged. Particulate Matter explores this contradiction. There is a benign quality to these works –- they don’t so much dramatize the conditions of air pollution and climate change as suggested in the exhibition’s title, but infer, in their loveliness, the subtle and creeping insidiousness of our current moment. The difficulty in taking the natural world’s appearances at face value is felt.
Media
Schedule
from October 27, 2013 to January 05, 2014
Opening Reception on 2013-10-27 from 18:00 to 20:00