I like the confusing perspective of the installation of this exhibition. When one first walks into the gallery, one's depth perception seems off, and what's a painted surface versus a three-dimensional surface is a bit of a mystery. I also found some of the images reminiscent of a Gerhard Richter painting of a meadow.
From the press release:
Several large wall pieces loosely depict postcard versions of coastal California. At first glance, these appear to be large multilayered canvas paintings of beautiful scenes rich with glazes and grounded in painting tradition. In fact, they are standard 4×8 foot plywood and sheetrock layered in drywall mud. This mud is pigmented with commercial tints and applied with a trowel more in the tradition of house building than conventional landscape painting.
Dozens of carefully cast, concrete replicas of river rock and quarry stones ranging in scale from overlooked pebbles to average landscaping rock are carefully placed in piles around the gallery. Some rocks blend with the architecture of the space while others supply substructure for the weighty landscape pieces. It soon becomes clear that there is a uniformity of color and a repeat of the forms not present in nature, an evident indication that they are not rocks but replicas. Their function is multi-faceted: they represent the geological foundation of an exterior landscape, their concrete material represents the foundation of a house, while at the same time they are hand-crafted art objects.
There is a rather obsessive quality to making hand-waxed, crafted rocks to present big piles of them. When we walked into the gallery on Saturday afternoon, Dennis Christie told us "We just sold a pile of rocks!"
