MY CALIFORNIA | New Works by Michael McDermott
February 17 - March 17, 2007

Reception: First Friday, March 2, 2007 6-9PM

Michael McDermott | We'll Rescue you (Salvation) (2007) and Fever (2006)

Swarm Gallery is pleased to present Michael McDermott's first solo exhibition, "My California," presenting a new body of work comprised of oil paintings and mixed media sculpture. Here the artist's interests lie in his humorous perspective of California, culling from many sources: winemaking, helicopters, the outdoors, the Boy Scouts, love and luxury.

Landscapes play a dominant role in McDermott's paintings. Both surreal and super-real, they are infused with the complexity of the artist's imagination and the orienting power of California's terrain. Evoking traditional painting styles, the core of McDermott's work lies in his great sense of observation and keen awareness of his surroundings.

In all of McDermott's works are a collision of colors, icons and statements that reveal extant beauty in the everyday. His objects, which range in material from tinted urethane to bronze and copper, are neither rational, nor completely abstract. The artist manifests his ideas by delving into the themes of place and perspective, reinterpreting his sense of home.

Michael McDermott was born in 1975 in Dekalb, Illinois and has been working as an artist in California since 1999.

Please inquire with gallery for detailed information on works

PROJECT SPACE | BILD 20 (Pure Paint) by Jared Lindsay Clark (through March 25)

Jared Clark, Build 20 (2007), Hotel soap

Like other "Bild" installations the artist has created, Bild 20 is a collection of found objects transformed into a sculptural painting. Bild means "picture" in German and connotes phonetically the construction of something architectural or sculptural in English. This installation describes the level of this dichotomy well, encompassing thousands of hotel soaps and nearly one hundred marble trophy bases. Each bar of soap, by virtue of its white rectangular surface is an automatic canvas, a pure readymade surface gessoed but not yet painted on, or like an ideal Minimal object, finished and pure in its reduction of detail (as emphasized in the two "Soap Drawings" on the outer walls).

Despite the strange difference in materials between soap and marble, the two types of small rectangular objects make a new kind of logic together. While the shapes speak of the relatively recent legacy of Minimal art, the marble offers a direct connection to what was once considered the highest medium of sculpture since the Renaissance. Glued directly to the wall these objects not only insert themselves in the site where we expect paintings to be (the white wall of a gallery) but seen in aggregate they form reference to the Modernist grid painting. This grid is further corrupted by a textual structure lying underneath. In cursive pencil the words "Pure Paint" are mirrored from the center of the wall (pencil lines still visible near the edges where the soaps begin to separate) and form the template for the soap/marble grid to follow. While effectively jostling the grid into an unpure version of perfection, the symmetrical design was used to further confuse the ideals of Modernism and Minimalism by creating a decidedly Baroque pattern of swirling excess. Coupled with the vertical edge placement of the objects the effect is of a cathedral design or a chapel's organ pipes pointing to heaven, ironically displacing the transcendental goal of Modernism with that of centuries earlier.

Modernist painting was about being enveloped in an emotional life experience in front of the work. Duchamp criticized such artists as "olfactory" and "retinal," obsessed with the smell and look of oil paint. Bild 20 pokes fun at both by striving to provide a sublime experience undercut by ordinary objects and by replacing the scent of oil paint with an almost oppressive sweetness of hotel bathroom scent.

Thus Pure Paint is both and neither. In a way, Bild 20 subverts the very art historical references it pretends to champion. The marble is not high sculpture like Michelangelo, but dissected bowling trophies. The soap is only pure in its pun as a cleaning agent, its content is far from pure as multiple references and images will flood any viewer's interpretation.

Jared is an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA. His creative experiments have been featured in the Deitch Projects Art Parade (2006), New York City, NY and Scope London (2006) with ADA Gallery. He also received a VMFA Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Foundation (2006).

See more of Jared's work on the Swarm Gallery artist roster here.