October 23 - November 29, 2008

PROLOGUE TO PAINTING

During a bloody Intifada, the horrors of September 11, and when the initial bombing of Baghdad began in 2003, northwest artist Scott Bailey was teaching and working in Cairo, Egypt. It was from this unique social, political and psychological perspective that the imperative to respond fomented. As a young artist who has traveled to over fifty countries and who has often incorporated those experiences and stylistic influences into his work, it was never more difficult to be a stranger in a strange land. As a formal, expressionist painter steeped in the modernist tradition and its associated non-objective baggage, now back in the U.S. Bailey is forced to put into question his own practice in the face of the shock and awe of violence and the political events that follow. "Oversight," the artist's first major gallery exhibition in the northwest, brings together for the first time the resulting bodies of work stemming from the questioning of those experiences. Installed in the Main Space, White Cube, Hall and Black Box of the Gallery, the thirty pieces presented in the exhibition represent over five years of reflection on, expression about, and reaction to the geo-political events that are still affecting us today.

PAINTING FIRST

At first blush Bailey’s paintings are juicy, gestural abstractions with rational, seemingly mathematically derived compositional strategies. Whether impastoed, scraped, dripped or incised, the artist is adamant about paint being paint. The palette is amped up—acid greens and purples meet saturated reds, blues and pristine whites. Viewed as pure painting alone, they work—‘work’ the way Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” compositions transcend their subject matter—‘work’ like Thiebaud’s decadently frosted canvases featuring bold color alongside bold color. Where Bailey’s work differs decisively from the above two examples is content. In the same way that Luc Tuymans’ political content is central to understanding his practice, what lies beyond the sensual surface of Bailey’s paintings is key to any discussion of his project as a whole.

PLEIN AIRE PAINTING FROM A BOMB’S EYE VIEW

Take for example the pivot point for the exhibition, “Infrared,” installed in the gallery’s White Cube. Each of the eight traditional paintings on canvas as well as the large painted rug installed on the floor were inspired by a single NASA Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) aerial photograph taken of Baghdad on the morning of March 31, 2003. In the original photograph infrared, ultraviolet and reflected light produce a false-color satellite image breaking the landscape into easily discernable types. For example, areas of vegetation appear red due to the wavelengths used to make the image. This is literally a 21st century form of map making (as the technology was first made available in 2000) and Bailey goes one step further by utilizing it for his own form of 21st century landscape painting. As the artist explains it, “Web-based satellite image servers now allow us to access and understand the landscape in new and engaging ways, and in ways that may well render plein aire painting obsolete. From ergonomic office chairs, we can click and tap our way through digital perspectives that Lewis and Clark could not have conceived of. Much has been gained with this impressive technology to be sure, but I am also left with the sense that something has been lost. Even so, exquisite and troubling documentary images serve as fodder for a wealth of painterly expressions. They represent a split second, drawn out in time and space through months of contemplative work in the studio. Here, the act of painting and the careful study of the formal qualities of the image shine a different kind of light on the subject. At the same time, the process provides opportunities to consider geo-political and social threads, as developed by media and government sources of information.”

NEW TARGETS

In the Main Space of the Gallery, Bailey will be presenting his most recent paintings: aerial views of Tehran, Iran and Washington, D.C. Pitted against each other on opposing walls of the gallery, these paintings tap into the anxiety, skepticism, fear and the polemics of spying and ask the questions, “who’s watching whom?” and “who’s afraid of whom?” as the detailed and intrusive views of each capital are equally charged with speculation about nefarious activities and political maneuvering. As successful as Bailey is at translating the digital material into luscious, alluring paintings, he also duly acknowledges the utter futility and inevitable failure of such an enterprise: “I am inspired both positively and negatively by the beautiful and heavily loaded images of the landscape from above, as seen through the lenses of the omniscient technological eyes floating quietly above us. In the media, maps of these otherwise inaccessible places shown with graphic notations and symbols to describe what we believe to be there have become simulacra in macro that surely belie the reality of the micro. The buildings, roads and landscapes I paint are infused with memories, complicated emotions, and prejudices. My maps, like all maps (and all art for that matter), are vessels for subjective responses to place and susceptible to preconceived ideas, media influence, corruption and losses in translation.” Bailey’s ‘failures’ are our meditative benisons as we try to navigate our own ways through his open-ended political and psychogeographic landscapes. Or as Luc Tuymans aptly put it, “Every art has failed. How we fail is another matter.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

BLOOD DROP OR PAINTING DRIP?

Lawrimore Project will also be featuring an earlier body of work, "Drop Sculptures, 2002" in The Hall. As if presaging his current fascination with aerial photography and bomb's eye views, Bailey began this work while in Cairo after regularly witnessing visceral, bloody carcases hanging visibly in open air butcher shops, even as human carnage was palpable in the region's numerous conflicts. Transfixed by the splattering of blood (at once horrific and exquisite) and the apparent detachment from the violence of the act on the part of the butchers, Bailey equated the scene with his own practice in the studio, not to mention the ubiquity of the Abstract Expressionist gesture. The nine, blood-red "Drop Sculptures" in the exhibition are frozen snapshots of different stages of a drip of paint or a drop of blood hitting a solid surface. Made of modeling plastic and then hand-painted by the artist, the line of reasoning from these very specific, very graphic moments to the inferred violence depicted in the "Infrared" paintings and the implied violence of the Tehran and Washington D.C. works becomes easy to follow.

PAINTING SURVEILED

If all of the work in the exhibition to this point has an air of surveillance implied, the video installation in the gallery’s Black Box, “Above Rainier, 2006” makes the act literal.

The viewer is first confronted with an odd sight: a video camera trained on a small painting. Thanks to the other works in the show, we now recognize this painting as an aerial view of an as-yet-unidentified landscape. It isn’t until the viewer enters the Black Box that they realize that this live video feed of the painting is now being projected on a three-dimensional model of Mt. Rainier sculpted by the artist. This piece mirrors the process of satellite mapping servers, which take flat digitized overhead satellite images and bend them over a virtual topographical scaffolding of corresponding points of longitude, latitude, and altitude. As opposed to the “Infrared” work using photographs as origins, in this work painting itself is the source—it becomes both the subject under surveillance and the object projected onto the landscape revealing that our relationship to the world through images is always mediated.

If all of the work in the exhibition to this point has had an air of surveillance implied, the video installation in the gallery’s Black Box, “Above Rainier, 2006” makes the act literal.  

The viewer is first confronted with an odd sight:  a video camera trained on a small painting.  Thanks to the other work in the show, we now recognize this painting as an aerial view of an as-yet-identified landscape.  It isn’t until the viewer enters the Black Box that they realize that this live video feed of the painting is now being projected on a three-dimensional model of Mt. Rainier sculpted by the artist.  This piece mirrors the process of satellite mapping servers, which take flat digitized overhead satellite images and bend them over a virtual topographical scaffolding of corresponding points of longitude, latitude, and altitude.  As opposed to the “Infrared” work using photographs as origins, in this work painting itself is the source—it becomes both the subject under surveillance and the object projected onto the landscape revealing that our relationship to the world through images is always mediated.

As the artist states about “Above Rainier,” “I remain agnostic whether it is possible today for a painting to hold the power of the sublime as was claimed by romantic landscape painters like Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner, Albert Bierstadt, and those of the Hudson River School, or professed by more recent abstract artists such as Marc Rothko, Barnett Newman, Yves Klein, and James Turrell.  I have come even to wonder whether recent generations are capable of experiencing what they called the sublime, or whether that emotion is even culturally relevant. As the earth is surveyed and recorded in increasingly greater detail, I wonder if we may be developing a cynical hubris—the notion that we know and have conquered the landscape to the degree that we are immune to the complex sensation of the sublime's “delightful horror,” or “terrible joy.” When we look at a mountain range today, without sentiments of the Manifest Destiny Americans once felt or fear of the boundless untamed wilderness, can we experience Kant's “terrifying sublime” and any of its accompanying awe, veneration, pride, hope, ecstasy, dread and melancholy?”

BIOGRAPHY

Scott Bailey was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1968. He received his BA in Art from Gonzaga University in 1990 and his MFA in Painting from Colorado State University in 1997. His work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the US, Japan, Italy, Egypt and South Africa. He was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome in 1999; participated in the Contemporary International Curatorial Practices Seminar at the American University in Cairo that same year as well as in 2001; and was a visiting artist at the Painting Workshop at Technikon Pretoria, South Africa in 2000. His work has been reviewed in national and international publications such as Art in America, Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, Egypt Today, The Cairo Times and Minami Nihon Shimbun. Bailey is also a critic, curator and educator, currently the Seattle Corresponding Editor for Contemporary Magazine (London). He has taught around the globe and is now the Head of the Art Department at Wenatchee Valley College in Washington State where he now lives and works full-time. This is his first exhibition with Lawrimore Project and his first in Seattle.

To view all the work in the show click here

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