NYAB Event - Joseph Montgomery “Calves”

Joseph Montgomery “Calves”

Laurel Gitlen

This event has ended.

In his newest body of work, Montgomery further articulates his critical position in painting, positing that images can be both literal objects and representations, and that their production can be similarly twofold: both labored and automatic. This exhibition presents a group of paintings in pale and powdery shades nearly approaching colors, a palette that makes the insistently tangible objects seem to partly dissolve in shadow, recede in relief, or collapse into visual effect.

Beginning with his first solo exhibition at the gallery in 2010, Montgomery has engaged painting with a hybrid or pluralist approach to image-making. Initially, two types of paintings emerged in Montgomery’s practice. The first employs the logic and form of collage–amalgams of sheet metal and cardboard fragments coated, creased, and encrusted with oil, resin, paper, fiberglass, oatmeal or wooden shims. The second exclusively employs a single element from the collages—the shim or wedge—as a unit of perpetual progression and variation in geometric, grid-based compositions. Often working in series, each painting’s structure and materials creates the terms for his next, employing manually repeated forms and strategies of representation as well as computer algorithms as catalysts for consecutive iterations of images. This evolutionary approach—a sort of image Darwinism—is manifest in his system for titling: each finished work is drolly titled “Image” and numbered sequentially.

Oscillating between the idea of painting as a unique object and as mere manifestations of images predetermined by a formal logic or conceptual law, the work thus establishes a dialectic between physical labor in the studio and automated production. This emphasis on labor and production as resistance to, or an illustration of, the nihilism of modern painting’s reductive endgame is further explored in the artist’s recent forays into animation. A single character—an avatar born from his paintings and constructed from hinged cedar shims—performs simple tasks, suggesting a substitute protagonist in the studio and another surrogate for painting. Simultaneously assuming the role of the artist and the artwork, the avatar is a metaphor for Montgomery’s painting practice: an autonomous, self-generating machine.