Event

The Road to ParadisePost an Event »

Catharine Clark Gallery

March 15 - April 20, 2008

Info

248 Utah Street
 San Francisco, CA 94103
Google Map »
The Road to Paradise
Opening reception Saturday, 15 March, 2 - 4pm Catharine Clark Gallery announces the upcoming solo exhibition titled The Road to Paradise of new paintings by Chester Arnold. Winchester Redux by Jeremy Blake is presented in the video project room. The exhibition dates are March 15 – April 19, 2008. The opening reception is Saturday, March 15, 2-4pm. In The Road to Paradise Chester Arnold continues his ongoing visual exploration into notions of accumulation and dispersal. His new work is tempered also by an awareness of the obsolescence facing time honored cultural and artistic practices: heartfelt sentiments no longer occupy letters but are rather featured in e-mail as the printed word increasingly gives way to pixilated screens. With the advent of new media the paintbrush has increasingly acquiesced to the same fate. In this latest body of paintings, masses of books and papers line desolate streets and toss on the wind. One painting, “The Business of America is Business,” is a classic example of Arnold’s ability to create large scale images through minute details. Old telephones, computers, papers, books, vinyl records fill the composition. The images wearily denote a fleeting bygone moment of destruction summoned, perhaps, by our collective visual conscience, media saturated with images of New York streets after 9/11 or the bayous of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And yet in paintings such as “Reports to the Contrary,” Arnold is able to extract the ethereal beauty and optimism inherent in watching loose papers dance in the air, summoning that rare moment of hopefulness in the moribund film American Beauty (1999) when Wes Bentley’s character Ricky Fitts films a plastic bag blowing in the breeze.