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Eli Ridgway Gallery

October 17 - November 15, 2009

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172 Minna Street San Francisco, CA 94105
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Paintings of the Vernacular
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 17th, 4-7 PM Brendan Lott's artistic production reflects the voice that our visually dominated culture copiously generates and distributes through the Internet. The subjects of his paintings are images harvested from the ubiquitous cyber-debris that the modern age of digital photography has cultivated, yielding a surplus of amateur snapshots from which to choose and subsequently transform. While digital file sharing connects individuals, it remains in a superficially ocular mode, in turn encouraging narcissistic over-communication and reciprocal voyeurism. Lott's found images often depict unsettling adolescent sexuality and crude self-portraits. This indelicate and highly psychological subject matter gains added impact through Lott's titles, which regularly reference popular music or the Bible and further elevate these found images with associations as blasphemous as they are clever. It is not only the subject matter that explores contemporary customs, but the paintings' very production also reflects the world Lott lives in. He outsources his chosen image files to China, where the digital files are painted in a highly realistic style. The economic relationship further typifies the hierarchic transactions that characterize contemporary production and labor. "These works began as an attempt to bring my practice in line with my life as a person living in 21st-century America -- wholly mediated, isolated, digital and decentralized and devoid of manual labor or craft," Lott says in his artist's statement. "I have no direct input into the development or manufacture of any product I consume." His process reflects the virtual seclusion of such physically isolating social networks in which relationships are founded not on knowing, but rather on the act of looking. Reflecting modern faith and dependency on the Internet, Lott's conceptual design tackles the visual relationships engendered by the proliferation of digital images. Critically editing the overwhelming infinity of digital imagery, his task rests in selecting and framing those particularly compelling photographs and then delivering them into the realm of fine art through a parallel practice of removed creation.