PSTL Gallery: Friday, 5 March 2010
Daniel McGrath: What Pictures Want
Please join us for the OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, March 5,6pm-9pm
March 5-April 24
Gallery hours: 10:30am through 5pm, Tuesday-Saturday
What Pictures Want is an ongoing series of text based paintings based on W.J.T. Mitchell's hypothesis that pictures must be considered living things that communicate and have desires, as outlined in his essay "What Do Pictures Want?" from 2005. These paintings' desires in short, are to trade places with the beholder turning him or her into an image for the gaze of the picture. The text is found in a variety of publications and books about art and reproduced with Helvetica font and house paint. A generic font and an anonymous value scale of black and white, both are nearly ubiquitous in our visual landscape today. Zeroing in on some of the more outrageous statements made in these books, each painting conveys a statement in the form of a dryly written vinyl didactic panel. Each statement has the verb tenses and nouns altered to convey the painting as narrator. The punctuation and text alignment is slightly askew in each painting, an indication that something is not quite right, perhaps suggesting that a copy editor has not cleared the statement or that the graphic designer is being slack.
Please join us for the OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, March 5,6pm-9pm
March 5-April 24
Gallery hours: 10:30am through 5pm, Tuesday-Saturday
What Pictures Want is an ongoing series of text based paintings based on W.J.T. Mitchell's hypothesis that pictures must be considered living things that communicate and have desires, as outlined in his essay "What Do Pictures Want?" from 2005. These paintings' desires in short, are to trade places with the beholder turning him or her into an image for the gaze of the picture. The text is found in a variety of publications and books about art and reproduced with Helvetica font and house paint. A generic font and an anonymous value scale of black and white, both are nearly ubiquitous in our visual landscape today. Zeroing in on some of the more outrageous statements made in these books, each painting conveys a statement in the form of a dryly written vinyl didactic panel. Each statement has the verb tenses and nouns altered to convey the painting as narrator. The punctuation and text alignment is slightly askew in each painting, an indication that something is not quite right, perhaps suggesting that a copy editor has not cleared the statement or that the graphic designer is being slack.
PSTL Gallery
3842 Washington Blvd.
Saint Louis, MO 63108
314-531-4304
http://www.paceframing.com
3842 Washington Blvd.
Saint Louis, MO 63108
314-531-4304
http://www.paceframing.com
posted by Bill Barrett at 11:25 AM
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