Eric LoPresti "Different Country"

Like the Spice

poster for Eric LoPresti "Different Country"

This event has ended.

The American landscapes that Eric LoPresti depicts in his new paintings and drawings is, despite the soft hues with which he often inflects it, one that consistently reflects this "dark center". Maintaining his established focus on the physical and psychological aftermath of the Cold War, LoPresti renders landscapes bearing the scars of nuclear testing and subsequent environmental clean-up campaigns, especially those near where he grew up, in the desert steppe of eastern Washington state, near the Hanford plutonium production site. With nods to both Ed Ruscha's take on the pop-inflected vista of the West Coast and Gerhard Richter's mastery of historically burdened European equivalents, "Different Country",LoPresti's third solo show at Like the Spice Gallery, achieves a kind of "desert noir".

LoPresti juxtaposes his landscapes with spectral color gradients and dark linear elements, pitting his ongoing investigation into a specific technological, cultural, and geopolitical narrative with an enquiry into the nature of perception itself. He often starts with a softly gradated color field a signifier of subjectivity, a "wild card" seen differently by every viewer. After overlaying landscape imagery based upon photographs he makes from chartered planes, LoPresti imposes onto each view precise black lines, suggesting a systematic, perhaps even violent division of territory. The lines hint at annotated military satellite imagery and formally echo the vector graphics of early 1980s-era video games. The result is a sophisticated commentary on the human manipulation of nature, that also reflects our ability to understand an image as at once highly
codified and open to divergent interpretations.

Media

Schedule

from April 08, 2011 to May 08, 2011

Opening Reception on 2011-04-08 from 18:30 to 21:00

Artist(s)

Eric LoPresti

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