Along these lines installation view. photo credit: Mario Gallucci
“The grid per se is of absolutely no importance to any of the artists in this exhibition, providing, as it does, merely an armature for a variety of styles, means and contents.”
Lucy Lippard, Top to Bottom, Left to Right, 1972
“..The grid serves not only as emblem but also as myth. For like all myths, it deals with paradox and contradiction not by dissolving the paradox or resolving the contradiction, but by covering them over so that they seem (but only seem) to go away. The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) which at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).”
Rosalind Krauss, Grids, 1979
Along these lines is an exhibition of recent works by Julia Bradshaw, Ron Linn, and John Whitten. With landscape as their primary subject matter, these artists use time-intensive techniques in photography, painting, and drawing to explore the ambiguous authority of the grid when used to map spaces. These artists challenge the sociopolitical/historical gridded division of the landscape, employ the grid in scientific myth-making, and play with the breakdown of the pixelated pictorial space.
This small group show was organized by John Whitten and exhibited in October 2022 at Well Well Projects in Portland, OR.
