EXHIBITION IMAGES | WORKS | PRESS RELEASE
HALSEY MCKAY is pleased to present, Still Life With Woodpecker, an interdisciplinary group show. Taking its name from the 1980 Novel by Tom Robbins, the exhibition looks beyond traditional definitions of still life to see how the presentation of objects can perform as narrative, index, ornament, illusion and abstraction – sometimes simultaneously. Irreverant and poetic, the group finds new meanings and interpretations in the specific and ordinary.
Appropriately titled “Hurry Up! I’m Dreaming,” Ugo Rondinone’s bronze birdbath sets a fantastical tone between the actual and the other that pervades the exhibition. Ryan Steadman’s paintings of found books double as trompe l’oeil objects yet his attention to each ripple and tear of tattered dust jackets lends itself to painterly concerns that these abstract compostions take shape as. Similarly Paul Gagner’s renderings of abstract paintings in the studio are both calculated realism and flattened abstraction. His paintings of signs act as the things themselves – “For Sale by Owner” advertises itself, the painting, for sale, by the artist. Torey Thornton’s still life of a milky glass, hat and orange that appear resting on a wooden shelf, is physically painted on slat wood panels with a moulding shelf. These combinations of image, object and material lead us somewhere between two and three dimesions.
David B. Smith takes inspriation from bit-graphic video game iconography, creating vector patterns from single charcters which are then industrially embroidered. Hovering off the gallery wall, Smiths’ Super Mario themed works appear as flying carpets manifested in corporeal space that could have emerged from their own 8 bit one. Kevin Zucker also exploits the translation from an informational to a material state in his painting process. Claustra walls are depicted in bitmapped imagery making pictures of both pattern and place. Pixelation, due to scale shifting from file to canvas, fuctions simultaneously as pictorial rain and digitally dileneated form. In Lisa Williamson’s sculptures the role of scale, and its manipulation, further push the recognizeable into the abstract. Her Hairpins blown up to body sized wall works invite elegant considerations of minimalist sculpture before we can recognize their everyday origins. Sarah Dornner’s use of wicker and wood also place us first in the home and guide us elsewhere. Her analytic abstractions of projected architectural drawings and mathematical equations take shape in three-dimensional in her rattan confessional.