The Washington Art Association located at 4 Bryan Memorial Plaza in Washington Depor has announced a new art show called i “Made Realities – Real Solutions”. This is an exhibition of recent paintings by Neil Callander of Alabama, Russell Horton of Missouri and Marc Roder of Oregon, that will be on display through May 7th. The three painters were selected as winner of the Washington Art Association’s Second Annual Juried Exhibition by juror, William Bailey.
Neil Callander believes narrative is an innate and inescapable fact in a realist painting. Callender packs his paintings with cultural and personal references working toward a flexible narrative. As more details are added, the internal relationships get tighter, and more intricate. The act of viewing his paintings unlocks these complex internal relationships. Callender hopes by experiencing these dense paintings that slowly reveal their nature allow the viewer to cope with the pervasiveness of fast-talking, slick images of our media-riddled world.
A native New Englander, Russell Horton is currently living and working in Kansas City Metro area. His paintings convey a sense of profound solitude and contemplation looking out upon the vast expansive horizons. His most recent work explores the prairie lands of Kansas and the bottomlands near the Missouri River.
Horton’s landscapes are unpeopled allowing the viewer to contemplate the scene without distraction. Pump jacks, holding tanks, water towers and other structures gain exaggerated prominence in the stark openness. The unspoiled vista of American landscape tradition no longer exists here. This is not a criticism of how the land is being used but rather a critique of nostalgic rhetoric of the pristine.
His industrial street scenes are from a section of Kansas City, MO known as the West Bottoms. The abstract nature of the architecture, shipping containers and concrete overpasses are a departure point for further exploration of that world.
Marc Roder’s paintings reflect on processes of gathering and discarding, voyaging and exploration. His paintings are accumulations of human debris that replaces the presence of the figure and biological activity. Roder pursues a personal investigation of natural phenomena that are both powerfully material and curiously ephemeral at the same time. Depicting gems, icebergs, UFOs, he reveals something is there, we see it, it reflects light and embodies transformation and possibility – there is that moment when heaven and earth are bridged. Then it is gone, and the descriptions he records on canvas are what are left for the viewer to debate.
The Gallery hours are Tues. – Sat. from 10 am to 5 pm. For more information on Litchfield Hills www.litchfieldhills.com
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