Event

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Important Projects

September 24 - October 25, 2011

Info

http://importantprojects.net/

5432 Boyd Avenue Oakland, CA 94618

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Matthew Draving

Opening 6-9pm Saturday, September 24, 2011 -- A house is a machine for living in and the grass is greener on the other side. Checking In shines a spotlight on the absence of the ideal in domestic space. Draving’s installation fragments and fabricates dimension and intermixes the gallery’s suburban underpinnings into the exhibition space. Through the fusion of video and object, Draving paints a mirage-like portrait, replacing empty white walls with a hallucinatory voyage through unidentified domestic existences. A theatrical integration of moving images and interior design serves to deny the viewer any certainties and instead reinforces a circle of disjointed spaces. Hidden in the work are visual cues which allow one to forget about magic and indulge in a complacent reality. -- The paintings in Stick Like Glue create parallel universes and articulate a particular physics in which the surfaces attract and fasten the images brimming just beneath the surface. Williams draws her subjects from first-hand accounts, personal and found photos, video stills, and daily life ephemera. She paints with a blurring and looseness suggesting a willfully open and disjointed identity, built up with visible traces of the previous stages. In her portraits, nearly all the subjects are painted with their gaze averted, appearing as characters separated from their lines, left to improvise within their inherited surroundings. Each work is a physical record of her conversation with a subject; the narratives and sub narratives explore the structuring of memory, suggesting both the bareness of the everyday and the grandiosity of imagination.

Jessica Williams, Girls Club