Aaron Williams
Construction
On View: September 19th - November 2nd, 2013
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 19th, 6-8 PM
I don't think about the future, I think about what's happening today. Fuck tomorrow, it's just really not important. Long as I don't get arrested today, whatever. Fuck it, whatever's happening today is the only thing that really matters. -G.G. Allin
LaMontagne Gallery is pleased to present Construction, a show of recent work by Aaron Williams.
The exhibition will feature a large, multi- panel installation as well as a group of smaller, monochrome photographs. Williams is exploring dual natures of the notion of construction, as well as questioning his own creative history and ideas surrounding abstraction. Leaving behind traditional, painterly modes of working, Williams is investigating new visual and conceptual strategies as well as the relationship between hand- made and machine generated mark making.
The primary artwork in the exhibition, after which the show is titled, is a 48"x 380" wall piece comprised of a series of painted and carved, plywood panels. As the title implies, Construction is made from materials and processes common to the building trades: particle board, commonly used as floor underlayment, latex house paints and hand and machine carved marks, created with a router. These are readily available materials that reference home building and renovation, systematic process based on precise planning. Rote craft is the inherent quality generally associated with construction. Discovery is discouraged, except for where it occasionally yields gains in efficiency. While the end result contains an aesthetic component, the method is largely analytical.
Contrasting this familiar notion of construction is an alternate meaning, found within the fine arts: that of the construction of an abstract painting. Over a period of several months, Williams visited museums and galleries, taking detailed photographs of paintings by celebrated abstractionists: deKooning, Cy Twombly, Kline, Motherwell and Guston, among others. He photographed errant marks which, while prominent parts of the work, are largely accidental: drips, spatter, pools of paint and the remnants created from the paths of strident brush strokes. Isolating these elements, he created a digital drawing which was then carved into painted, construction grade panels. The resulting piece presents an inverse of these accidental marks; they are recast in the role of pictographs, routed into the surface of the panels.
Inherent in Construction is a questioning of the notion of the heroic gesture and the attendant spiritual subtext proposed in much Abstract Expressionist work. These rarified ideas stand in sharp contrast to simple building materials and methods and a question is posed: can similar senses be stirred through the reproduction of a "heroic" brushstroke and can the same conversation surround a simulacrum? Ultimately, Williams interest lies in the compounding and collapsing of these arguments; finding the places between concepts to forge new pathways for expression and fresh reasons to introduce marks onto a surface.
In contrast to the ambitious, exertive nature of Construction, Williams is also presenting a series of monochrome photographs of the sky, taken outside his studio and near the work spaces of deKooning and Jackson Pollock in eastern Long Island, NY. Using the standard dimensions of typical portraiture (24"x 18"), these images reshape the common idea of space, implying a human portrayal. In much the same way that a carved representation of an accidental paint drip alters it's original meaning, Williams is transforming landscape space into form by bringing the color to the surface, creating opaque blocks of blue form. Beginning with the tacit description of an action occurring in a place through surreptitious images (sky), these images become conversations of the forms themselves; the vast depth of the sky becomes a solid square of color and portrait and landscape space collapse into one another.
Born in Rhode Island, Aaron Williams received his BFA at Maine College of Art, and his MFA at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He lives and works in Queens, NY.