New Work
S. Billie Mandle
Michael Zachary
S. Billie Mandle
Michael Zachary
August 7th - August 28th 2010
Opening Reception August 7
7 - 10pm
Billie Mandle uses her camera as an epistemological tool. The thing about
her pictures that gets under your skin is not so much their silence as it is their
brazen, stubborn refusal to resolve into familiar certainties. To look at one of her
photographs is to invite dangerous uncertainties like truth, belief, and justification
to have their proper seats with you at the table, and once seated the do not go
away easily. You might just as well set off a bomb in the middle of your living
room, the effect would be the same. The only thing these pictures leave you
with is the hope of something like a genuine dialog: seeing as touch, seeing as
negotiation, seeing as a way of growing closer to the peculiar state of things
as they are and not as we think they should be. Seeing till, in the end, we are
(always and eternally) standing somewhere rich and strange.
Michael Zachary:
The act of painting is a necessity for me: what Wallace Steven called “the poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice”.
My paintings record a way of exploring driven by curiosity, experiment, and formal scrutiny. The poetry in my work does not lie in the virtuosity of its construction or in the comfort of a familiar aesthetic. Rather, the poetry in my paintings is the product a continuous chain of decisions, each an uncompromising stab at what will suffice at each given moment. These decisions gather together the time and the necessity of the painting’s making, and it is within the gestalt they form that the poetry of that making resides.
Somewhere behind that poetry lies the target I am shooting for in every painting I make: a freedom won through the constant embrace of impermanence, openness, necessity, and play in the world.
Opening Reception August 7
7 - 10pm
Billie Mandle uses her camera as an epistemological tool. The thing about
her pictures that gets under your skin is not so much their silence as it is their
brazen, stubborn refusal to resolve into familiar certainties. To look at one of her
photographs is to invite dangerous uncertainties like truth, belief, and justification
to have their proper seats with you at the table, and once seated the do not go
away easily. You might just as well set off a bomb in the middle of your living
room, the effect would be the same. The only thing these pictures leave you
with is the hope of something like a genuine dialog: seeing as touch, seeing as
negotiation, seeing as a way of growing closer to the peculiar state of things
as they are and not as we think they should be. Seeing till, in the end, we are
(always and eternally) standing somewhere rich and strange.
Michael Zachary:
The act of painting is a necessity for me: what Wallace Steven called “the poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice”.
My paintings record a way of exploring driven by curiosity, experiment, and formal scrutiny. The poetry in my work does not lie in the virtuosity of its construction or in the comfort of a familiar aesthetic. Rather, the poetry in my paintings is the product a continuous chain of decisions, each an uncompromising stab at what will suffice at each given moment. These decisions gather together the time and the necessity of the painting’s making, and it is within the gestalt they form that the poetry of that making resides.
Somewhere behind that poetry lies the target I am shooting for in every painting I make: a freedom won through the constant embrace of impermanence, openness, necessity, and play in the world.
