OPENING RECEPTION: 1ST THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2018, FROM 5 - 8PM

Sullivan Goss is pleased to announce a new exhibition called SYSTEM DISRUPTION that seeks answers in visual art to one of the most important questions of our era – namely, what is the ideal balance between a system (or pattern) and its disruption? Everywhere you look these days, some system or another is being “disrupted”: from politics to technology to the climate itself. This exhibition doesn’t try to stake claims on any of these issues specifically, although some of the pieces may lean in one direction or another. Instead, the exhibition is organized around the idea that our eye sometimes “knows” things about the world before we have any rational or mathematical explanation. It therefore attempts to mine some of the best visual thinkers – artists – to see how we might better balance the need for orderliness and predictability with the need for invention and change.

What might be said to constitute an art “system?” For the earliest artist in the exhibition, Lockwood de Forest (1850-1932), his system involved working on a certain size substrate and often with similar proportions of land, sea, and sky. The size of the substrate, in turn, was based on proportions in his own body. De Forest painted outdoors, so the works had to be finished fairly quickly; and because they were painted on a thick paper material, he couldn’t go back in to turpentine out mistakes. The repetition of this one system allowed him the maximum freedom to develop and refine his subtle coloration and evocative brushwork as he painted all over the world. In his case, the “system” was both a format and a process.

The same might be said for Nicole Strasburg, whose small gouache paintings of images taken from a weather camera near her mountain home were born out of a desire to learn to paint in gouache. Nicole began collecting these internet-borne weather camera shots before she decided to make a print of the basic forms of the landscape. She then paints on these prints, recording the ever changing landscape captured by the camera. One landscape painted in one size and one medium in all seasons nevertheless manages a striking amount of variety. Climatic change is more than enough disruption for her system.

Artist Bob Nugent also employs the idea of a similar format within a constrained process. In his case, he draws and paints studies of things he’s noted along the Amazon river on to large sheets of wood veneer which he then slices in to 3 x 3 inch pieces. These smaller pieces are then collaged onto panels to create one foot by one foot nature studies. The artist himself is interested in how the filter of memory interacts with the photographic and written to transcribe experiences. But perhaps there is also a subtle message about the clear cutting of Amazon rainforests and the ever changing shape of the river itself?

R. Nelson Parrish was so intrigued by a process – the scraping of layers of wet spray paint – that he created a format and eventually a form around it. Painting numerous wet on wet layers of archival aerosol on cold pressed Arches paper, he soon realized that there wasn’t time to do very much other than scrape stripes. (The paint would dry too quickly.) It wasn’t long before the American flag emerged, and with it, content. No symbol more potent, more malleable, or – in the red and blue and black and white flags being shown here – more relevant.