August 16 - September 29, 2007

Leo Saul Berk• Bradley Biancardi • Cris Bruch • Buddy Bunting • Timothy Cross

Blake Haygood • Susie J Lee • Alex Schweder | Curated by Kyle Bain

Duchamp is rolling over in his grave! Lawrimore Project has razed the doors of Etant Donnes, Marcel's posthumous peep show of a painterly tableau to present Perfect Landscape: Painting Broken Down, the first in a three-part series of exhibitions exploring contemporary painting strategies.

This first installment was guest-curated by art history undergrad and Lawrimore Project summer intern, Kyle Bain. As a point of departure, Bain takes as given: Cris Bruch's sculpture, Perfect Landscape, is a painting. In doing so, questions of perspectival rendering, the role of drawing, architectonic structure, conceptual intent and gestural abstraction arise.

Work from Seattle artists Blake Haygood, Bradley Biancardi, Susie J. Lee, Leo Saul Berk, Tim Cross, Buddy Bunting, and Alex Schweder, reveal surprising connections to Bruch's sculpture and expose strategies and ramifications of articulating 3-dimensional space in 2-dimensions. Here, drawing emerges as a unifying theme as traditionally limned territories are overrun by schematics, grids and painterly gestures, structures are built up and broken down, landscapes and institutions seep in and out of existence, and the gallery space itself threatens to collapse beneath layers of hypothetical paint.

CRIS BRUCH

A title like Perfect Landscape brings to mind the pastoral, idyllic hillsides of Constable and Bierstadt, replete with eternally meandering rivers, and immutable mountains majestic –contained, complete scenes that seem to have always been just so. What then are we to make of this many-faced sculpture, equal parts red doughnut and purple elephant, resting conspicuously on the floor? To look at it is to examine each seam – as beguiling as the sum is, the parts simply demand your attention, begging you to imagine its assembly, its beginnings, its flawed, unfinished state. Cris’ piece is all about fixing – the planning and piecing and labor involved in making something perfect. Whether it is Cris’ relationship with his father, our suburban surroundings, or the environment itself, here, Landscape seems to imply something constructed.

As a model for painting, the piece points similarly to structure; its angularity and overtly mathematical form recall the predetermined, precisely drawn, perspectival rendering of space in two dimensions. And yet there is something entirely unplanned about it. The surface is mottled, confused, improvised. The entire piece appears simply to have landed, as if bringing itself into being. It is this organic quality that lends itself so easily to painting, where forms slip fluidly in and out of existence and compositions ‘complete themselves’ as the artist continually responds and redetermines.

BRADLEY BIANCARDI
It might not be readily apparent, but chances are you have spent some time in one of Bradley Biancardi’s paintings. He begins by looking closely at a familiar territory, probing and plumbing in hallways, elevators, and atriums. Biancardi’s canvases transform these simple spaces by laying a latticed framework of striping brushstrokes - blueprints for a room built in tape and oil. In WYNDEL HUNT IN CRAWL SPACE, 2007, linear forms erupt in near-symmetry from a central source but the resulting image occupies a dimension well beyond the accustomed, comfortable world of one-point perspective. Under Biancardi’s hand, Crawl Space is simultaneously fractured and reinforced, redefining our conceptions of space and representation.

BLAKE HAYGOOD

Captivated by a recent omnipresence of explosive images, things tend to fall apart in Blake Haygood’s work. The forms occupying his panels are ambiguous, tree-bark-textured wheels vaguely reminiscent of rudimentary mechanics. Positioned obliquely against a backdrop of mottled monochrome, these freewheeling figures collapse even as they turn, spiraling into dissolution, spilling off the page. The indeterminate subjects and denial of location suggest that the question for Haygood is not necessarily what is coming undone (political systems, America’s agrarian roots, what have you) but how.

What Does It Take?, 2007 seems to ask what is required of a system (natural, political, painted, or otherwise) to maintain stability, not so much dwelling on entropy as musing on harmony.

BUDDY BUNTING

"Substance Abuse Treatment facility, Corcorcan California, 2006"
Ink wash on paper
50 x 180 inches

Prisons are, for obvious reasons, among the most structurally sound buildings we erect. Their facades are visibly imposing; modern fortresses lined in halogen-turrets and barbwire battlements, exuding a concrete message of endurance and security. Buddy Bunting’s work examines these same exteriors to a temporal, vulnerable end. Substance Abuse Treatment facility, Corcorcan California, 2006 captures institutional stability in its even, orderly composition – every form has ‘fallen in line’ and yet, despite its architectural integrity, it all seems about to disappear. Bunting employs ink washes to create ethereal, haunting renderings – shadows lacking in substance but heavy in emotional tenor, exemplifying the ability of a medium to inform meaning.

Courtesy SOIL Gallery (No image available)

TIMOTHY CROSS

The format of Timothy Cross’ images is one we are accustomed to. His canvases are comfortably and equitably divided into three sections: land, sea, and sky, receding politely into the distance, anchored by a horizon line. Some of them even have sunsets. Cross employs this formula common to depictions of the land, inviting his viewers to inhabit suggested beaches, bays, and other familiar (if fictive) territories. We recognize waves in the flat, drawn pattern of THICKET POINT, 2007, and understand the adjacent blank to be land; we are refused entrance, however, by the explosion of paint protruding abruptly from the foreground, sending acrylic vegetation and schematic-shrapnel careening indeterminately across a vacant, would-be sky. By disrupting our expectations for painting and the land itself, Cross’ work raises issues of ownership and questions our ability to control our surroundings.

LEO SAUL BERK
The advent of CNC techonology (Computer Numerical Control) revolutionized manufacturing. No longer limited by the constraints of human labor, production became incessant. And virtually errorless. Leo Saul Berk utilizes CNC in his drawings, turning our attention away from the assembly line to what it means to find perfection on paper. His pages are home to topographies alluringly inked in sparkling greens and blues; the flawless execution of their line at odds with the amorphous vortex of their form, begging the question: what are these spaces like in three dimensions? His current work maps the interiors of mines, exploring the ramifications of a reliance on charting space in 2-D.

Courtesy of Howard House

ALEX SCHWEDER
“The relationship between occupied spaces and occupying bodies is a shifting one; we subjectively make our built world; thereafter it constructs us as occupying subjects. Working at the intersection of art and architecture, I understand our built environment as a site for playing out fantasies about our bodies... Architecture does not often pose difficult questions to its occupying bodies; art does not often publicly explore uncomfortable topics outside of museums and private spaces. However, at their intersection art and architecture might more productively explore the complicated facets of being human.” ~Alex Schweder

In Instructions For This Space: Painting, 2007, Schweder explores paint as thickness, removing aesthetic concerns, questioning utility and threatening to collapse the institution of the gallery.

SUSIE J. LEE
“My work merges digital content with physical object. Crossing illusion with physicality and motion with stasis, the projection cleaves to the form in an extricable dialogue. The topography and materiality respond to and alter the projection; the projection emphasizes the integrity and presence of the object. In contextualizing the phenomenological properties of materials, a material language emerges. Actions and material qualities become metaphorical touchstones, as elements opens and close, disappear and reappear, and linger on contours and edges.” ~ Susie J. Lee

In Caesura, 2006 Lee elects sand as the foundation for her projection. Light spills across the plane, eroding darkness to define a growing topography, leaving its impression in the sand once the glow has faded. The piece reads as a metaphor for both the creative act and the formation and maintenance of natural environments; its message is one of agency and impact.