Not On But In The Door Oil on Wood panel 20 x 30 cm
Birch Oil on Wood panel 20 x 30 cm
Chard Oil on Wood panel 30 x 20 cm
No Mans Land Is A Pool Of Light Oil on Wood panel 20 x 20 cm
Branches Grown From Sky To Ground Oil on Wood panel 25 x 30 cm
The Backseat Window Oil on Wood panel 20 x 30 cm
Encroaching On A Cloud Oil on Wood panel 20 x 30 cm
Ghosts Without Bark Oil on Wood panel 30 x 20 cm
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
Images courtesy of Jeff Masamori
Noontime Ghosts -Eve Leibe Gallery
'Untitled' Oil on Canvas 153 x 112 cm
'Untitled' Oil on Canvas 92 x 122 cm
'Meaning Hole' Oil on Canvas 92 x 117 cm
'Angel Wings' Oil on Canvas 70 x 70 cm
'Ashtray Eyes' Oil on Linen 41 x 30 cm
'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' Oil on Canvas 127 x 112 cm
''It Pales in Comparison' Oil on Linen 120 x 60 cm
'Untitled' Oil on Canvas 183 x 117 cm
'Rush' Oil on Linen 88 x 88 cm
'Dawn' Oil on Linen 20 x 25 cm
'Can You Taste the Crush' Oil on Linen 45 x 40 cm
'Untitled' Oil on Linen 35 x 30 cm
'Untitled' Oil on Linen 30 x 25 cm
'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