October 1 – October 26
Opening reception: Thursday, October 3 from 5-8 pm
A conversation with the artist will be held on Saturday, October 12 at 4 pm
Hearne Pardee extends his interpretation of everyday landscapes in works on view at the Bowery Gallery. Using multiple images and working from videos, Pardee investigates our awareness of space and time.
His focus is a neighborhood park in Davis, California, where a public art installation features stones aligned with the solstices. A mini-Stonehenge, it evokes geological time and cosmic space amid encroaching suburban subdivisions.
2019, Oil on Canvas, 30” x 40”
By rotating, juxtaposing and translating images into different media, Pardee generates multi-panel works that inspire reflection on our relationship to the perceptual field and to the pictorial fields that map it.
2019, Oil on Canvas, 30”x 40”
2019, Graphite and Acrylic Collage on Panel, 25”x 38”
The show includes paintings made from direct observation and drawings made from videos of the site. These improvisational drawings capture glimpses, much as we do in actual perception. Just as we construct from them a stable world, Pardee employs grids to construct an overall view of the park in quadrants based on the cardinal directions – N/S/E/W.
2019, Oil on Canvas, 30”x 40”
Pardee transfers this abstracted space into oil paintings, whose layered fields engage touch as much as vision, and which provide screens for memories and associations to other sites – the sort of psychological involvement that nourishes a sense of place. Color, through collage, extends the interaction among these screens. Their multiple frames and simplified images also suggest the world of comics and the exaggerated landscapes of George Herriman.
2019, Graphite and Acrylic Collage on Paper, 38”x 50”
Pardee is currently completing a public installation in a park in Sacramento, which combines colored grids and painted views and engages him with an actual suburban environment.
Previous exhibitions, documenting everyday landscapes from the Lower East Side to the Pacific island of New Caledonia, have been reviewed in ARTnews and Art In America. Pardee also writes about art, and publishes regularly in The Brooklyn Rail and artciritcal.com. He teaches at the University of California, Davis.
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