James Gardner | Painting Eaters
KATZMAN CONTEMPORARY
April Hickox | Provenance Unknown
On View: February 5 to March 5
Opening Reception: Friday, February 12 from 6 to 9 p
www.katzmancontemporary.com
Painting is the focal point of the current exhibitions at Katzman Contemporary.
With James Gardner’s Painting Eaters, the viewer confronts densely layered amorphous paintings. The surfaces glow with effervescent and earthy hues; the raw construction materials expand on top of each other creating inspired imaginary landscapes.
With April Hickox’s Provenance Unknown, the viewer engages with photographs of paintings that are no longer paintings: the canvases were abandoned; the canvases were destroyed; the stretchers were resold; the resulting photographs reveal the void that remains.
These exhibitions indulge in the seductiveness of materiality and juxtapose current reconsiderations of what constitutes the painting-as-object.
Exhibition Statements:
“I employ the word ‘cannibalistic’ to describe how my paintings go through states of aesthetic and formal consuming, devouring and absorbing in my studio. Paintings often split in two; paintings get cut up and intermingled; they congeal and divide, mollify and colligate. The studio is as much a place to bring ideas to, as it is a space with its own ecology and architecture in which ideas can happen and take form. My work emphasizes materiality and processes of making, while serving as an index to the happenstance of the studio. I use painting, along with all its physical components and conventions, as a framework to explore materiality, and the possible ways that an engagement with material substance can engender meaning. I have become interested in how a material can mean, how making can make meaning, and the ways in which it may be possible to think through substances and materials.
It is worth noting that my individual studio practice is complemented, compromised, high jacked, and precariously balanced with attempts at collective art making, curatorial pursuits, and varied critically rigorous forms of jackassery through cavorting around with the people of VSVSVS.” – James Gardner (2016)
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“I am fascinated by the artistic process: how ‘art’ is determined; what ‘value’ is placed on art; and what remains ‘unseen’ in the making of art. In Provenance Unknown, I consider concepts of value, authorship, and origin in relation to the odd phenomenon at my workplace where abandoned student paintings are destroyed with huge cuts to the canvas so that the stretchers may be resold. Upon discovering these canvases, I was struck by the paradox of the nurturing and destroying within the artistic process.” – April Hickox (2016)
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