KANSAS

Paintings by Scott Anderson & David Leigh

Opening Reception Friday, April 17th 5-8 PM

Show runs through Saturday, May 16th 2015

Kansas is nothing and everything at the same time. Both Scott Anderson and David Leigh spent formative years of their lives there, and the work in this exhibition filters and balances those memories against a backdrop of contemporary image making.

Anderson’s works are made from found photographs of mall interiors from the late 1980s and early 1990s. An adolescent living in the Kansas suburbs of Kansas City at this time, he spent a fare share of hours in malls; they were social sites as much as commercial ones for kids his age. Anderson writes, “I have complicated feelings about these spaces and this time of my life in general. I can't help but associate the aesthetics of suburban sprawl with positive memories of my teenage years, despite my opinions of how such aesthetics also signify commodity fetish, unsustainable land-use, and architectural homogeny. I'm at once critical and nostalgic.”

There is a similar paradox in his painting practice. He has a soft spot for the romantic mythology that surrounds the history of painting, particularly modernism, though he’s well aware of its temporal station and problematic histories. He is at once earnestly interested in the romantic gesture and totally self-conscious of it.

Leigh’s images are compressed between Ronald Reagan and the Challenger explosion in 1986. Having grown up in the hack streets and yards of military housing, Kansas required imagination to navigate the tumult of first everything; first love, violence, and authority became containers for later imagery. Kansas at that time was an elision of the 1960s and MTV—atomic bomb drills and Michael Jackson. “It was a specific type of existence, a living space generally protected by the government from predators and danger, that slowed down time, so to speak. We had the illusion of safety from previous generations, and we were able to experience everything unchallenged, mostly because no one was really around to stop us.” Everything mattered a little bit, everything was raw, but everything could be leveled by a tornado or Soviet missile at any moment. Kansas was a space where all was possible; a fitting analog to the potential of painting and drawing.

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MALL HUFFERS (SOCIAL STUDIES)

SCOTT ANDERSON

2015. 60" X 48" Oil, oil crayon and graphite on canvas.

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MALL HUFFERS (NIGHT-SCHOOL)

SCOTT ANDERSON

2015. 40" x 32" Acrylic, oil and oil crayon on canvas.

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MALL HUFFERS (BAGGY SWEATSHIRT)

SCOTT ANDERSON

2015. 66" x 60" Acrylic, oil and oil crayon on canvas.