NYAB Event - William Buchina “Time to Speak a Human Language”

William Buchina “Time to Speak a Human Language”

Garis & Hahn

This event has ended.

Garis & Hahn presents Time to Speak a Human Language, a solo show of new works by William Buchina. A selection of new paintings will be exhibited in the upstairs gallery, which represents the first major series of works on canvas in the artist’s career. Downstairs, new ink on paper works, along with a curated selection of objects and source material from the artist’s personal archive will be presented in an installation as a window into the artist’s mind. This is Buchina’s second solo show with Garis & Hahn.

These new paintings exist in the realm of the ordinary and the surreal, lingering in a space between representation and abstraction. Time to Speak a Human Language is a culmination of the artist’s recent series done in grid-like or paneled layout, also featured in his 2014 show at Garis & Hahn, Lower than the Lowest Animal. In these new canvases, Buchina puts illustration, painting, and collage-style composition into close contact. The images depicted are a palimpsest of sourcing, alteration, and stylized disfiguration.

Buchina’s practice lies as much in his sourcing and process as it does in his execution. Over the course of his career he has collected material from books, the web, and corners of attics. Buchina repurposes and recasts these sources in his own detailed, distinct ink illustrations. His scrupulous style leaves some source material roughly as it was found, and alters others beyond recognition. A single composition often features thirty or forty distinct sources.

Buchina’s process of degradation and renewal is reflected in the scenes presented here, and the accumulated visions are both dystopian and appealing. The mechanics of industrialized production are commingled with the human form. Process and procedure compete with the arbitrary and animal. In this series Buchina has also opted for a larger, more iconographic scale. This exhibition’s work is like the hieroglyphs of a near future, or the Voyager spacecraft’s Golden Record by way of Raymond Pettibon.

Buchina’s images broadcast a de-familiarized human ritual. They operate with the precise ordering of our strangest dreams, and the dreaminess of our everyday lives. This non-verbal language born from Buchina’s aesthetic communicates the inner world of the artist’s mind, much like human speech, but is strongly invested in the preverbal as well.