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Not On But In The Door   Oil on Wood panel   20 x 30 cm

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Birch   Oil on Wood panel   20 x 30 cm

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Chard   Oil on Wood panel   30 x 20 cm

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No Mans Land Is A Pool Of Light   Oil on Wood panel   20 x 20 cm

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Branches Grown From Sky To Ground   Oil on Wood panel   25 x 30 cm

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The Backseat Window   Oil on Wood panel   20 x 30 cm

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Encroaching On A Cloud   Oil on Wood panel   20 x 30 cm

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 Ghosts Without Bark  Oil on Wood panel   30 x 20 cm

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Rockpool 1   Oil on Wood panel   40.5 x 43.5 cm

Two Hundred Pounds Of Cement

 

June 10th - July 31st 2023

at 536 Davis Street

Barriers are everywhere in the countryside. They shape our relationship with the landscape, and our understanding of nature. 


Some barriers are intended to keep us out. Hedges, gates, barbed wire prevent us from accessing the landscape, because our curiosity might harm it or the interests of those who inhabit it.  This distance from the landscape changes our vision of it too. It remains unknowable and becomes visually abstract. In real life as in paintings, hills, from far away, appear blue. 


The other kind of barrier - windows, screens, canvases - allow us to experience the landscape but keep us detached from its physical effect. However, though the environment is not able to affect us, it does affect the barrier. When water streaks on a window, it distorts the view; when direct light hits a painting, it blocks our view. Atmospheric effects, by reminding us of the presence of the barrier, remind us that reality is both figurative and abstract at the same time. A snowdrift is on some level just a pile of hexagons.


Barriers exist in the city too, but we as city dwellers tend to notice them more in the countryside. Away from street signs and traffic lights and language, we don’t know what we’re looking at. There, reality is made of different things. Like the other barriers, this allows us to see the landscape both clearly and obscurely. Not knowing the name of a type of tree stops us from seeing the tree; knowing the name of the type of tree stops us from seeing that specific tree. We distrust it. 

 

This show is an exploration of these barriers, and how our detachment from the landscape and from nature can be a way of exploring it.

 

Process is key to how this works. Each painting is constructed of multiple, unrelated and unplanned layers of paint. Different paintings are made on top of one another but gaps are left, or scratched away, each layer masking the last. The forms are created in reverse, from a combination of elements from different layers. We are forced to read them in ways we aren’t used to, with the near things being read last and the far things first. On closer inspection, a branch suspending snow reveals itself to be snow suspending a branch. 

 

The paintings all show opposites. In these works, skies have texture and form while hills have none, daylight is painted in dark colours. They are all landscapes, and yet they are (almost) all hung as portraits. Between these contradictions, we are able to catch glimpses of something real, something which is both figurative and abstract, a tree that is like any other tree, but also has its own name.

- Text courtesy of Jack Dunleavy

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Images courtesy of Jeff Masamori

Armour Install shot

Noontime Ghosts -Eve Leibe Gallery

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'Untitled'  Oil on Canvas  153 x 112 cm

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'Untitled'  Oil on Canvas  92 x 122 cm

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'Meaning Hole'  Oil on Canvas   92 x 117 cm

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'Angel Wings'  Oil on Canvas  70 x 70 cm

Ashtray Eyes

'Ashtray Eyes'  Oil on Linen  41 x 30 cm

Armour

'Armour'  Oil on Canvas  153 x 214 cm

'Burn'  Oil on Canvas  118 x 153 cm

'Untitled'  Oil on Linen 120 x 60 cm

AIRHEAD

'Airhead'  Oil on Canvas  127 x 112 cm

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''It Pales in Comparison'  Oil on Linen  120 x 60 cm 

Drunk Preacher

'Untitled'  Oil on Canvas  183 x 117 cm

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'Rush'  Oil on Linen  88 x 88 cm

Dawn

'Dawn'  Oil on Linen  20 x 25 cm

Can You Taste The Crush

'Can You Taste the Crush'  Oil on Linen  45 x 40 cm

Disco

'Untitled'  Oil on Linen  35 x 30 cm

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'Untitled'  Oil on Linen  30 x 25 cm

2020 Stars and stripes

'2020 Stars and Stripes'  Oil on Linen  25 x 20 cm

'Guillotine'  Oil on Linen  31 x 41 cm

'Airhead'  Oil on Linen  36 x 26 cm

'My Eyes Tie-dyed'  Oil on Linen  35 x 46 cm

 

Whatever’s for lunch is fine.

 

Nov 8th—Apr 1st 2020

at 1288 15th Ave

For the reopening of 1288 15th Avenue, we welcome Will Thomson for his debut exhibition with Problem Library and first solo in the US.

The exhibition is comprised of painting, photography and installations with a common reflective value. Will’s work directs us towards discernible and common inner moments. Separate from photographic concepts in the artists practice, a real scene is never depicted but emerges from process.

Multiple versions of each painting exist within layers of oil paint that have been reduced, reworked, and rebuilt through both sides of raw linen.

–Peanut butter sandwich, two apples and an orange, you don’t have to have a filet mignon in order to be happy.

The title of the show is a phrase from a spiritual lecture playing in a car, overheard by the artist. The unfamiliar source, and chance form in which it appeared, acted as symbolic in its parallel to the visual experience that begins each artwork.

'Varicose Bliss'  Oil on Linen  71 x 71 cm

'Pollen'  Oil on Linen  25 x 35 cm

'I Wanna Be Like Water If I Can'  Oil on Linen  30 x 40 cm

'The Heater'  Oil on Linen  30 x 40 cm

'Untitled'  Oil on Linen  30 x 40 cm

'Untitled'  Oil on Linen  15 x 20 cm 

Selected Exhibitions

Solo:

Two Hundred Pounds of Cement - Problem Library - 2023 - San Francisco

Whatever's For Lunch Is Fine - Problem Library - 2019 - San Francisco 

 

Group:

-Noontime Ghosts - Eve Leibe - 2022 - London

-Pathways on Paper - South Parade - 2022 - London

-Future Fossils - Alice Black - 2021 - London

-On View - Problem Library - 2021 - San Francisco 

-For Your Eyes Only - Bubenberg - 2020 - Paris/Online 

-Art Market San Francisco - Problem Library - 2019 - San Francisco 

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