Gallery | [SUB]URBAN
New paintings by Claire Baker and R. Reynolds

Project | Is A Catnip Grin The Milk? | Video installation by Andrea Goldman

June 26 - August 2, 2009
Exhibit Opening | Friday, June 26, 6-8PM

PRESS RELEASE

R. Reynolds, Retreating Green (2009), Oil on panel

Swarm Gallery is pleased to present new paintings by LA-based artist Claire Baker and Berkeley-based artist R. Reynolds. Both artists are plein air and studio painters, focusing on landscapes near their homes and images from lived experience.

Claire Baker's works embrace inanimate nature in an animate, direct and front light, through a contemporary, cathedralesque, romantic relationship to nature. There is a surprise thread of visual mystery in her work, creating an ambiguous, imbedded tension in an otherwise romantic mood. Nature is, as defined by Baker, the perseverant bamboo and unforgiving sun in the backyard of her LA home. The paint handling is akin to that of ink, in terms of employing a full range of transparency and opacity in the paint application.

The basis for R. Reynolds' work is a direct connection to a sense of place. His paintings describe the time and condition of the landscape. They represent the perpetual dialogue between time, space, and the observer. He returns to the same place for months, working on paintings and drawings. Reynolds will repaint the same subject multiple times because it allows him to refine the idea and develop the type of visual mood he wants conveyed. The subject is deconstructed and rebuilt in a cyclical process. Work in the studio is created using his various studies and remembered forms. These paintings serve as a documentation of lived experience, fragmented by memory and perception.

PREVIEW WORKS

Project | Is A Catnip Grin The Milk? | Video installation by Andrea Goldman

In Andrea Goldman's video and performative text work, humor upsets ideological rhetorics that position the subject.

For this show at Swarm, cats debate capitalism in the PowerPoint presentation/video work entitled RETHINKING CApiTaliSm. In this piece, points of debates are anagrams of the phrase "Rethinking Capitalism":

"R king in the capitalism?"

"Him Paternalistic King."

"Re: capitalism ink thing."

Inspired by the cat website "I can has cheezburger" (which assumes cats can't spell), texting shorthand, and current debates about capitalism and power relations, the anthropomorphized cats fluctuate between anarchist leanings, nihilism, and hope for new possibilities.

The work will be accompanied by GOD v dog, a palindromic video in which god and dog argue about who's who.

These works use voice, texts, and paranoid parameters to explore truth systems that rhetorically define subjects within hierarchical structures. Goldman says, "The voice is endlessly peculiar because it is on the line between the body, the given, and some kind of transcendence. Language is simultaneously and weirdly stuff and thoughts. And using paranoid parameters allows me to simultaneously find meaning and freedom through any kind of lens. I see these lenses (anagrams, palindromes, existent texts...) as parallel to truth-systems, which all are essentially, but necessarily, scarily paranoid." In these works, Goldman's cast of doppelgangers debates their isms and, hopefully, through a brittle balance of sense and non-sense, gives room for laughter and the undoing of foregone conclusions.