Tom McFarland & Josh Rowell “New Territory”

Unix Gallery

[Image: Tom McFarland "727 Carlsbad Cavers Highway 2/4" (2016) Mixed media 72 x 50 in.]

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UNIX Gallery presents the opening of New Territory, a dual exhibition featuring contemporary artists, Tom McFarland and Josh Rowell. The show features brand new paintings and compelling works never before seen in the gallery.

McFarland’s string paintings echo the way thoughts bounce around ideas and memories. The string is attached to anchor points around the edges of the stretcher bars. It runs across the surface of the work, ties into other points and continues, eventually connecting all the other points. Individual paths add up together to make a “canvas” that gives depth, structure, and overall form to the work. “Because every detail in the work is visible, every element on display, the viewer can consider each string separately, its color, how it is attached, stretched, or intersected with other strings or even the wood behind it,” McFarland explains. “Like looking closely at a specimen with a magnifying glass,” its matter is wholly apparent.

Josh Rowell generates his artistic vision by focusing on technological advances that shape our contemporary lives, communicating our increasingly mediated human interactions within the confines of visual art. The artist balances more analogue techniques and laborious production processes with conceptual instantaneous nature of the digital age. This juxtaposition produces a language that explores and reshapes information, and precipitating alternative ways of reading the world around us. Since his emergence as an abstract painter, Rowell has expanded to sculpture, mixed media, and often works with light, video, and sound installations. Despite these disparate media, everything is underpinned by a coding system, “everything can be reduced to a molecular binarism where all systems can be simplified to yes/no decisions,” explains the artist.