Garth Weiser @ Casey Kaplan Gallery, NYC

Garth Weiser

Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

Through March 6, 2021

Casey Kaplan presents an exhibition of new paintings by GARTH WEISER, the artist’s eighth solo presentation with the gallery.

In these new artworks, Garth Weiser amplifies the visual lexicon of his predominately abstract oeuvre by revealing elements of representation within his dense, layered paintings. Expanding upon a unique process whereby divergent compositions are superimposed on a single canvas, Weiser has for the first time turned to appropriated imagery as primary source material. To produce the paintings, Weiser selects images intuitively from a variety of platforms, moving fluidly across niche social media forums, Fanart blogs, gaming channels, and e-commerce sites. Digital media is modified, manipulated and integrated within the textured topography of Garth Weiser’s oil canvases. Each painting surface is built with contrasting layers of thick impasto, weaving virtual figuration and abstract forms until multiple intersecting patterns emerge.

The content of the appropriated imagery ranges from emblematic and provocative to bizarre and banal. Video game avatars and subcultural band mascots fuse with stock graphics, CAD vectors, and textural renderings that are selected primarily for their formal and tactile qualities. The resulting paintings display an acute somatic awareness imbued with a technocratic tilt. Human forms, fossilized within striations of oil paint, adopt bionic qualities that blur the boundaries between animal and machine. The repetition of spiral extremities, as seen in “love” (2020) and “international center of photography” (2020), recalls both human viscera and the futuristic tentacles of a technologically advanced being. Other works unearth monstrous figures lurking behind layers of paint alongside glimpses of biomorphic grotesquerie. These paintings become reminiscent of the visual language employed by late medieval and early Renaissance artists including Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and Goya. At the same time, Garth Weiser engages with the formalism of Color Field Painting and Geometric Abstraction and the rough materiality of Neo-Expressionism. By accessing a multitude of art-historical references, Weiser harnesses the expressive power of the grotesque through both representational and material means.

As Garth Weiser builds each canvas, the representational imagery erodes within its abstract overlay. The legibility of competing figures vacillates recalling philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings on ‘aspect perception,’ whereby a single image or object can contain two distinct representations - both of which can be seen, but not simultaneously. This flickering of perception is akin to the altered waves of an interference pattern, as seen in lenticular printing and holography. The paintings are scared with claw-like lacerations that further complicate the intertwined patterns. Weiser applies thin strips of tape over his compositions as he works, forming indentations within the thick oil paint upon removal. Additional cavities are created by cutting away exterior paint layers with a utility knife, revealing pops of color or glimpses of the printed imagery underneath. This removal process becomes a painterly gesture in and of itself, while also lending a sculptural quality to the canvases.

Both alien and inexplicably familiar, Garth Weiser’s new paintings speak to a collective subconscious permeated by anxiety, dissociation, absolutist thinking, social isolation, sanctimony, and escapism. These evocations are perhaps best illustrated by the recurring “2020” that appears in balloon font across multiple compositions. This number, once neutral , is now a Pavlovian trigger, provoking an immediate emotive response that exemplifies the reactionary nature of our contemporary moment. Contained within a complex web of illusory patterns, the paintings typify the social entanglement that distorts perspective and disrupts our ability to see things objectively, as they truly are.

CASEY KAPLAN GALLERY

121 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

caseykaplangallery.com

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Garth Weiser @ Casey Kaplan Gallery, NYC

Garth Weiser

Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

November 2 – December 23, 2017

Casey Kaplan presents new paintings by GARTH WEISER, marking his seventh exhibition with the gallery.

Garth Weiser’s large-scale compositions resume an ongoing concern for spatial abstraction and perspectival deviations. His canvases are meticulously crafted and built through a unique process of taping, spraying, cutting, and scraping. Intricate layers of crisscrossing paint emerge in an evocation akin to neural pathways of the brain. Trapped underneath grated layers of enamel, oil and gold leaf, Garth Weiser’s preliminary gestural markings act as physical traces of memories embedded in a matrix of synaptic connections.

Garth Weiser's new paintings reveal distinct patterns, idioms, logos, and symbols beneath striations of paint. His turbulent under-paintings are achieved through recent material experimentation. Incorporating elements of collage and repurposing cut sections of t-shirts, Weiser is alluding to the ubiquity and inevitable commodification of subcultural ephemera. In one painting, entitled The Walking Dead (2017) a humorous, yet uncanny smiley face, rendered in a post-apocalyptic neon sludge, flickers underneath a thick network of paint. In other works, swathes of tie-dye form a pseudo-countercultural backdrop for passive or even complacent slogans, such as “every little thing is going to be alright” and “l ? DC”. These disparate segments are hybridized into the canvases and then buried by several layers of oil and spray paint. The underlying elements re-emerge only after multiple coatings and excavations. Through this process, the paintings accumulate densely textured surfaces, further obscuring their legibility. Small ruts, recalling the welded markings of excavation-hole covers, fuse with dyed cotton and intersect with larger, burn-like scars. Grooves rise into peaks where the paint coagulates.

The resulting works function as visual riddles with no single solution. The collaged systems appear as though intertwined — vibrating between foreground and background, unclear as to where one ends and another begins. Each composition remains in a constant state of flux, triggering multistable perceptions. In effect, ambiguous sensory information confounds our cognitive ability to process the divergent visual outputs.

GARTH WEISER (b. 1979, Helena, MT) lives and works in New York City and Hillsdale, NY. Garth Weiser was recently the subject of a major retrospective at The Contemporary Austin Art Museum in Austin, TX, with an accompanying monograph published on the occasion. Other recent solo exhibitions include: Altman Siegel, San Francisco, (2014); Casey Kaplan, New York, (2013); and White Flag Projects, St. Louis, MO, (2010). His work has additionally been included in numerous group exhibitions, such as: The Campaign for Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2016);l Pattern: Follow the Rules, the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum at Michigan State University (2013); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2012); Nothing Beside Remains, curated by Shamim Momin, Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Marfa, TX (2011); Seeing is a Kind of Thinking: A Jim Nutt Companion, curated by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL (2011); and Big New Field: Artists in the Cowboys Stadium Art Program, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX (2010). Garth Weiser’s work is held in collections of prominent institutions, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Whitworth, University of Manchester, Manchester, England; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum: Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

CASEY KAPLAN

121 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.caseykaplangallery.com