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Canton gallery show opens Jan. 18

Posted 1/16/17

CANTON -- St. Lawrence University’s Richard F. Brush Art Gallery will present an exhibition of recent works by David Gaither from Jan. 18-Feb. 25, following his first New York City solo show. …

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Canton gallery show opens Jan. 18

Posted

CANTON -- St. Lawrence University’s Richard F. Brush Art Gallery will present an exhibition of recent works by David Gaither from Jan. 18-Feb. 25, following his first New York City solo show.

According to Rebecca Owen and Gracie Mills of 511 Gallery in New York City, Gaither is an emerging, self-taught artist from Atlanta, whose paintings are bursting with multicolored, non-objective shapes that create an optical tapestry. Figurative forms occasionally occupy these half-real, half-fantasy worlds of the artist’s own meticulous creation.

A wide range of iconographic allusions, both recognizable and nonspecific, is depicted in vibrant colors and geometric forms. Large-scale, immersive triptychs and tondos are expansive and elaborate, challenging the distinction between ordinary pictorial space and that depicted in the abstract work. In Gaither’s tondos and most of the triptychs, the entire pictorial space is used, created, covered, and overlapped, so that there is no real background, middle-ground, or foreground in the traditional sense.

Gaither’s work devises its own dynamic dimension, inviting the viewer to join in his exploration of symbolism, iconography, repetition, and optics. The artist’s formal and symbolic experimentation has resulted in a body of work that would be impossible to imagine in any moment other than the contemporary. The graphic and collaged qualities of the paintings, which recall advertising logos, break the lines between flatness and three-dimensionality, abstraction and representation, subjectivity and objectivity, reality and fantasy, the seen and the imagined. In an increasingly digitized and branded world, many people may feel subjected to incessant visual overload.

This constant, yet often subliminal, osmosis of imagery is made tangible in Gaither’s portal-like canvases. In a juxtaposition of seemingly infinite, all-over pattern within the conventional rectangular or circular picture plane, the works simultaneously restrict and expand.

There also will be a gallery discussion with the Gaither, beginning at 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 6. The Richard F. Brush Art Gallery is located in St. Lawrence University’s Griffiths Arts Center. Parking is available in the H-Lot across from Griffiths Arts Center. Visit www.stlawu.edu/campus-map for an interactive map of the campus.

For more information, contact the Brush Art Gallery at 229-5174, or visit www.stlawu.edu/gallery.