NYAB Event - Steve Greene "Buzzing In My Ears"

Steve Greene "Buzzing In My Ears"

frosch & portmann

This event has ended.

frosch&portmann presents Buzzing In My Ears, our first solo exhibition by New York based gallery artist Steve Greene.

Steve Greene likes noise. The imagery of sound is predominant in his recent drawings and collages: tape recorders, sound waves, shapes and text that invoke noise or silence. The works are diagrammatic, list-based, concrete and abstract. The artist works with accident and deliberation, always looking for a balance between freedom and control.

Sight and sound are the dominant senses in the perception of art, and no art form is perceived by only one of the senses at a given time. Music can evoke images, and visual art can likewise produce a vibrating hum in the mind’s eye. Greene’s drawings are inseparable from his interest in recording and listening to noise, the music of everyday sounds, sound collage, drones and loops. Melding the senses in his work, the artist suggests sound, lining up a collaged piece of text with a painted shape so that text is registered simultaneously as a graphic shape and legible words. Graphs and diagrams read in a similar way: a diagram is not a realistic depiction, but more halfway between text and rendering, a bridge perhaps between the brain’s hemispheres, both concept and thing. The diagrams and bits of information, text, colored dots, snippets are to be read. They are keys that fit into spilled and poured shapes and open them into a potential convergence of motion and stasis, fact and idea. There are always little visual and verbal games to be played, suggested visual paths and industrial poems of juxtaposition.

Greene needs something other than a blank page to begin a drawing; a scrap of paper can be a start, or a stain suggesting an ambient drone, or a shape that implies sound. The reference of sound and recording serves as an entry point to the drawing for the artist as well as the viewer. In his works, Greene is describing noise, but also the sense of hearing in general, and broader still the idea of paying attention, listening to and looking at one’s surroundings, and bringing that back into the drawings.

This is Steve Greene's fourth solo exhibition in New York, and the first solo exhibition of his works on paper. Born in Crawfordsville, AR, the artist lives and works in New York. He received his B.F.A. from Pratt Institute.