PAINTING / OBJECTS

Melinda Harper
Zhejun (Joyce) Huang
Hannah Maskell
Jackson McLaren
Giles Ryder
Masato Takasaka

curated by Craig Easton and Aaron Martin

July 5 – 27th, 2024

There’s a line in that title somewhere and I don’t just mean the oblique.

Ok maybe it is oblique. But where does a painting, specifically an abstract painting, sit in today’s culture? Does it merely exist to follow on from all its others as proof of a tidy historical progression, aka modern histories? Is it part of the great postmodern ahistorical soup? Or… decorative device to pleasant up our private and shared walls?

I can’t answer any of this to be honest. It’s much too grand. And it’s doubtful any of the artists here would pretend to an answer either. Yet in making paintings that frequently refuse to exist purely as painting, I like to think each (in their own way) might also encourage tiny pockets of resistance to common ways of seeing. Not through continual repetition of what a painting is – but in a belief in conversations around what painting might still be.

Melinda Harper

Zhejun (Joyce) Huang

Hannah Maskell

Jackson McLaren

Giles Ryder

Masato Takasaka

All belong in this show (as do countless others). One way or another through their idiosyncratic methods they choose to make the viewer aware of these things / things operating in their own individual slices of space and time.

Here and now. Now and then.

And if some of the works here aren’t easily called paintings, you probably wouldn’t call them pictures either. They don’t picture much of anything.

Neither are they sculptures. None hold to that lineage let alone properly hold a space in the round.

But they do object occasionally.

Or become objects.

Paintings.

Object paintings.

Painting objects ////////

Craig Easton, June, 2024