Brad Tucker “Knuckle Mountain Lookout”

Arts + Leisure

[Image: Brad Tucker "Cove" (2016) 14 x 24 x.75 in. Fabric on wood.]

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Arts + Leisure presents Brad Tucker’s solo exhibition, Knuckle Mountain Lookout. For Tucker’s first project with Arts+Leisure, the artist will present a new series of minimalist wall and installation-based sculptures.

Brad Tucker’s most recent body of work further distills his interest in toying with the concept of form versus function. The innocuous shapes bear a strange acquaintance to everyday objects, or representations of objects; the same sense of familiarity you experience when you decide someone just has “one of those faces.” The works are almost all wood painted with acrylic or enamel, referencing a utilitarian purpose, and harken back to a mid-century design aesthetic wherein natural forms were diluted into a simple graphic quality that championed functionality.

Although Tucker doesn’t openly reject narrative, he doesn’t rely on it as a means of creating cohesion amongst a body of work. He explains that any beginning to a series in which a narrative is loosely implied eventually dissolves as the language becomes more formal. “I’m guilty of a kind of folksy formalism,” he explains. In fact, the title, Knuckle Mountain Lookout, as with all his exhibition titles, is the result of the final mementos of this dissolved narrative. This is not to confuse narrative with concept. Tucker’s works are imbedded in an inextricable matrix of material and formal expectations of objects as they exist in everyday life– the arch of mountain peaks, the swerve of a clenched fist, the hollow of a tooth or a soap dish– and rely on our preconceptions of these forms as well as their functions in order to exploit, and essentially betray, our expectations.

As a result, the work takes many different directions. It can be read as both the interplay of similar forms, but its decidedly non-functional nature also becomes an inquiry into the illusion of pictorial space within a painting. Tucker states, “I was always interested in a Yellow Pages kind of aesthetic– imagery that is simple and abstract, but at the same time symbolic of other things.” This intersectional quality encourages the viewer to consider the objects in relation to their own body, and seen in combination with one another, they express their vague intentions with a tongue-in-cheek displacement.

Brad Tucker (born 1965, West Covina, CA) lives and works in Austin, TX. He earned a B.F.A. from the University of North Texas, Denton, in 1991 and an M.F.A. from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, in 2009. From 1999-2000 he was an artist resident at the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Tucker has exhibited and performed internationally, including solo exhibitions at Inman Gallery, Houston, TX (2015, 2012, 2009, 2008, 2003, and 2001), Old Jail Art Center, Albany, TX (2013), Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles (2004), The Suburban, Oak Park, IL (2002), and Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, New York, NY (2002). His recent and notable group exhibitions include XYZ: The Geometric Impulse in Abstract Art, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2012), More Mergers and Acquisitions, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2009), The Fuzzy Set, LA>