After the Quake & Interior Oasis Exhibit
Interior Oasis
Referring to a liminal lobby space, “Interior Oasis” presents you with the familiar anchored into a landscape of endless drifting and possible calamity. The lobby concept provides a model for furnishing visual and material ideas to an observer, but close observation suggests the envelope may be failing. Aesthetics of persuasion, such as billboard-like signage, work alongside comforting allusions to the home and hospitality in the works presented; though, a small number of countervailing currents run through exhibit as well.
The flanking gallery spaces feature a show called “After the Quake” and there are signs of its upheaval within the space of the Oasis. The presence of text such as “I should have warned you” or the experiencing of double vision allude to a crumbling veneer of pictorial order.
Interior Oasis contemplates studies from the book “Learning from Las Vegas,” first printed in 1972, as an interesting lens for viewing our contemporary screen-based and commercial realities. The grey checkerboard, a familiar substrate in digital space and frequent in the paintings of Audrey Barcio, is absence made material. It is a unique manner of supporting positive form without negative form that is only possible in places like our Oasis.
Artists:
Audrey Barcio, Jessica Calderwood, Savannah Calhoun, Casey Connely, James Lambert, Andree Leduc, Lindsey Myers, Will Suglia, and Manon VanScoder.
After the Quake
- I dreamt that a man was looking back over the anamorphic landscape of dreams, and his gaze, though hard as steel, splintered into multiple gazes, each more innocent, each more defenseless.
—Roberto Bolano, Tres
The shaken landscape began with a splitting gaze and dreamlike disorder. In it’s wake, new work takes root, shaping fragments into once familiar forms. After the Quake is a haunted terrain where the afterimage of what was floats like a palimpsest upon its ruin. Such is the case in the crumbling walls of Hannon’s paintings where the traces of a spectral mask hover.
Once animated by innovative chemical and mechanical powers, this world is now moved through spirit and imagination. In the case of Chelsey Becker’s rough-hewn, wooden “Drive Train,” the user now moves its mechanical parts under their own power as part of a dialog consisting of many topics, including memory.
Morris Gibbons drawings drift into the cerebral in their combinatorial character. Beneath the web of assemblage is a metaphysical reflection on the self as it experiences mixed realities: one natural and primordial, the other confounded by entanglements with language and technology.
A split canvas by Scott Anderson takes on the role of processing and sharing the history in this place. The juxtaposition of a storied figure and a massive root tell us this is a tale of both the land and its inhabitants. Symbolic inscriptions and a realistically feigned wooden surface give the entire piece a kind of argumentation structure.
Artists:
Scott Anderson, Chelsey Becker, Morris Gibbons, and David Hannon.