The works in Moon Milk: Part 1 are about desire: a will to form that the artist grafts onto the ineluctable pull of gravity. The exhibition takes its title from the mythical substance in Italo Calvino’s short story The Distance of the Moon, a coveted glop fermenting on the Moon, which, eons ago, hung just above the Earth’s crust. That sticky terrain was the site of transformation: the decay of earthly matter and its recomposition as prized delicacy. The wire-formed crevices on Bergstrom’s canvases are filled with screws, brushes, bottle caps, pastry tips, sandpaper, tape, and tissue, held in place by thousands of viscous threads of acrylic paint. These are the sacrificial offerings of a painterly practice to which the artist returns each night, the collateral of a painting process structured by continual longing for something just outside of reach.
The pocks and divots we see every night on the Moon are the record of primordial collisions: with no atmosphere, no wind or weather, the moon bears each mark eternally: forever impressed, layer upon layer, onto a heavenly body in flux. So too is Bergstrom’s an additive process that builds but does not erase: in the cracks and fissures of his surface you see layer on layer of glitter and glue, like a studio floor inverted on the wall. These paintings are meant to be explored up close, an intimacy recalling a time when, perhaps, the Moon really did hang just above our heads, before retreating eternally out of reach, though always in view.
Timothy Bergstrom received his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Recent solo exhibitions have been with Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY; VOLTA NY and Roberto Paradise Gallery, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Bergstrom’s work has been included in the exhibitions: Xtraction, The Hole, NY, NY; This One’s Optimistic: Pincusion, The New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, CT; Material Matters, Indiana State University, IN, as well as in group shows at Monya Rowe Gallery, NY, NY; The Suburban, Oak Park, IL; Nudashank, Baltimore, MD; devening projects + editions, Chicago, IL and Southfirst, Brooklyn, NY. This is his second solo exhibiton with the gallery. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.