Gregory Thielker. Between Here and Now

About

This will be the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring 8 original hyperrealist works and a video installation. The exhibition will be held in both the ground level and lower level of the gallery. The artist will be in attendance for the opening reception on Saturday, March 5, 2016.

The hyperrealist windshield paintings investigate the relationship between seeing and feeling one's environment, to losing oneself in an ethereal moment. The interior of the car mutes the outside noises and exposes ephemeral views – the road, the sky, and other cars- all distorted by the droplets, rivulets, and sheets of water. The artist applies a cool and deliberate approach, painting in a series of thin layers to create believable spaces on the canvases. The methodical tactic is slow and meditative; Thielker works from photographs taken while driving, collaged together to create formally dynamic paintings, which take months to complete. Each painting exposes a slightly different level of abstraction, with clues to the 'America-by-car' landscape like a Citgo gas station sign, traffic signals, and overpass signs.

In his work, Thielker investigates the processes of perception and image making. On the lower level, a video shows a series of realistic watercolor paintings submerged in the rising tide at sunset. Waves lap at and wash over the paintings, depicting views of the Bangladesh coastline. Creating representations of the views on-site, only to have those images slowly eroded by water, is both a nod to early Conceptual work and to representational artists like Antonio Lopez Garcia and Rackstraw Downes, whose rigorous observational paintings often chronicle the passage of time. The exchange between painting and site is complicated by the Bay of Bengal's tenuous ecology, and the rising water levels worldwide. At the end of the video, waves slowly wear away the image on the paper, eventually pulling up the submerged panels and casting one adrift.