Curated by Franklin Evans, perspex:american shift presents 12 American artists: Amanda Church, Anthony Iacono, Brian Alfred, David Humphrey, Elliott Green, Eric Wolf, Ezra Johnson, Jackie Gendel, John Dilg, Kate Gilmore, Matthew F Fisher, and Pedro Barbeito.

Perspex: american shift presents work that to varying degrees reflects a repositioning related to the major cultural and global socio-political shifts that we have experienced over the past twenty years, including the most recent repositioned America of amplified cultural polarities. The art world and artists are not immune to this change..

During the past twenty years, I have discovered and/or explored the work of these artists. They all work in the United States, crossing the country from New York to Iowa to Los Angeles, so perhaps producing from a vantage point of geographic specificity. Some work seems to consciously slow our experience, allowing us to see more, slowly, and in full absorption. Some work embeds windows into windows, pictures into pictures, clean yet complex spaces of ambiguity. Who watches? How? And what? Other work uses contemporary distance filters, the cleaned-up pixels of the image read through screens, social media, and a sense of digital global proximity performed in the ubiquitous social media image feeds.

All of the work is painting (or arguably so), which seems strange in our digital age and half a century beyond painting’s proscriptive death. These artists make their work, aware of art’s history and the cultural present, but are also acutely involved in their specific and powerful ownership of their individual artistic practices. Even when art absorbs the world around itself, it is powerfully personal and experimental, a creative laboratory that shifts within its own space surrounded by or surrounding the world beyond.

- Franklin Evans March 2019

Link to FL Gallery , 2019

PRESS COVERAGE