Matt Phillips and Travis Fairclough “About Looking”

Ortega y Gasset Projects @ The Old American Can Factory

This event has ended.

‘The field that you are standing on

appears to have the same proportions as your own life.’

- John Berger, About Looking, pg. 205.

Ortega y Gasset Projects presents About Looking, an exhibition featuring Brooklyn-based painters Matt Phillips and Travis Fairclough that offers us a viewing experience rooted in patience and presence.

Phillips and Fairclough’s paintings create a weightless environment, one that urges us to grasp for forms and ground to rest on as we question the reoccurring shapes as figures, objects, and material. About Looking is a nod to the late John Berger, who advocated endlessly for patient and concerted attention in all facets of the arts. We may find steady ground to rest on as a way to assert our knowing of Phillips and Fairclough’s approach and technique, and are pressed to stand back and recalibrate our understanding again and again. To feel or to know these paintings is to feel and know the land and the ground we rest on, as Berger suggests in his text, About Looking, 1980.

It is an invaluable ability and a necessary practice to let go of outcomes while both viewing and making painting. Gracefully and patiently, Phillips and Fairclough’s work allows us freedom while viewing. Let us simply sink and swim in the work and company of Matt Phillips and Travis Fairclough in About Looking.

-CH

Travis Fairclough is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Fairclough earned his B.F.A in Painting at SUNY, Purchase College in 2014. His work has been shown at Scott Charmin Gallery, Gallery 1989, Gallery 151 and Life on Mars. Travis was twice an artist in residence at Byrdcliffe Arts colony and More Arts Engaging Residency.

Matt Phillips is a painter living and working in Brooklyn. Recent solo exhibitions include Comfort Inn at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects and Yard Sale at Devening Projects and Editions (Chicago). This April Phillips will have a solo exhibition in Trento, Italy at Studio d’Arte Raffaelli. The NYC Dept. of Ed. and the Public Art for Public Schools Program recently commissioned Phillips to install a large-scale mosaic at PS106. He is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a professor of art at FIT.

Catherine Haggarty received her M.F.A from Mason Gross, Rutgers Univeristy in 2011; and is currently a Co-Director of the artist run gallery, Ortega y Gasset in Gowanus, Brooklyn and a contributing writer and curator for The Curator. Having shown both nationally and internationally for a decade, Haggarty’s work has traveled steadily through New York and most recently Art on Paper Fair as part of Armory Week and Paper Paris, France (2016). Exhibitions include but not limited to: Geoffrey Young Gallery, Life on Mars, Bridget Mayer Gallery, This Friday Next Friday, Transmitter Gallery, Proto Gallery and more. Her work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, and she was the recipient of the ESKFF Emerging Artist Grant and Residency at Mana Contemporary in 2014.