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Indepth Arts News:
"Conglomerates: Randy Wray"
2003-06-06 until 2003-06-29
Lump gallery/projects
Raleigh, NC,
USA United States of America
Lump gallery/projects is pleased to announce its May exhibitions. Conglomerates will feature the work of North Carolina native Randy Wray. The project room will feature new work by New York artist Joshua Stern. Conglomerates features the work of North Carolina native Randy Wray who is a painter currently residing in New York City. Exhibitions include Derek Eller Gallery, Jack Tilton Gallery, Kagan Martos Gallery, Thread Waxing Space, David Beitzel Gallery, White Columns and most recently The Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro.
“Randy Wray has developed a lexicon that is uniquely his own. He makes abstract ceramic sculpture, photographs it and then scans the photos into a computer then altering their structure. The resultant paint-by-number schematic of 43 colors acts as a roadmap for these complexly elegant paintings, allowing for margins of improvisation and unexpected twists and turns. Wray is to the immediate eye, a gritty abstract painter to the core, yet his interests also incorporate Photo Realism and representation.
Theyre untitled still lifes of sculptures propelled by an abstract sensibility. The jagged pixilated gestures perhaps riff on Pointillism -- the van Gogh brushwork in one work crescendos and dips like a topological map or satellite photo. He stitches swatches of burlap onto the surface and cuts openings in the canvas sewing open weaves across the holes.
Painters dont seem averse to exploiting computer tools for their own devices, and its notable that Wrays potent canvases make one think of the special effect called noise offered on the software Photoshop. Even so, hes a gunslinger, confident in form, willful in intent and daring in execution. ” - - Max Henry
Joshua Stern is a photographer who currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.
Artist statement: My photographs have been created, in part, as a reaction to the self-congratulatory, self-valorous quality of the bombastic in art. In contrast, I offer the small, the simple, the insignificant as an antidote to the colossal and theatrical, laying claim to humility and an aura of silence. I use insignificant materials to create human figures and faces which function in an arena made grand through the elevation of the mundane. The absurd simplicity of the stick-figures along with the incipience of the sculpted faces are used to create an ineffable sense of the uber-human in the photographs. I’m attempting to elicit a primal response through projection of emotional and in the creation of a
panorama of contrast, (the visible light source and dark) and a gestural
movement. Through the isolation and reinterpretation of the figure, I strive to celebrate the stark beauty of the human condition.
IMAGE:
Randy Wray
acrylic, carborundum grits and glitter on canvas
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