Peripheral Vision
date. March 11 thru April 23
opening. March 11. 5 - 8 pm
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Pastine Projects is pleased to present an exhibition of color pencil drawings by Sid Garrison and acrylic paintings and sculpture by Robin McDonnell.
Peripheral Vision opens in the project space at Pastine Projects on Friday, March 11 and continues through April 23, 2022, running concurrently with the exhibition Eva Bovenzi | Present Perfect.
The exhibit will include five of Sid Garrison signature color pencil drawings. Robin McDonnell will exhibit her painted Styrofoam-and-epoxy sculpture and two paintings. Both artists’ work offer unique and surprising revelations in compositional form, color, and texture.
Intuitively inventive, the artwork of Sid Garrison and Robin McDonnell exists in an evanescent space that resists definition. Theodor Adorno identifies an authentic artwork as one that "remains an object of peripheral vision, like a faint star that can be seen only by looking slightly away from it.” Both artists, through their devotion to rigorous process and discovery, abandon familiar confines, using a visual language that, like Adorno’s star, exists outside of easy interpretation.
Sid Garrison builds up richly seductive surfaces by applying multiple layers of colored pencil to paper. Eccentric forms and unexpected color combinations evolve intuitively into rich and complex compositions. An acute attentiveness to execution imparts energy to these works. Garrison's process of sharpening pencils and meticulously layering color on paper is nothing less than devotional. Each work is unmistakably a signature Garrison drawing. And yet, each one is absolutely distinct.
Robin McDonnell celebrates process. She fuses painting and sculpture to create a tactile and expressive body of work. The surfaces of her new sculptures are energized by using spray paint to layer transparent color on forms that appear off-balance and ready to topple. The sculptures are made from Styrofoam and cardboard encased in epoxy with the intent of repurposing post-consumer waste. Both sculptures and paintings exemplify a driven exploration of color, movement, and idiosyncratic form. Sublime despite their modest scale, gesture, space and color evoke the moment of making.
Robin McDonnell is an artist working in Oakland, California. Her concerns have to do with nature and change - utilizing an intuitive materials-based process and abstract language. Her work is on both traditional linen panels and on three-dimensional forms made from recycled Styrofoam and encased in epoxy. She has been an art educator at Mills College, Stanford University and UC Berkeley. Her work has been reviewed multiple times and shown at museums, Art Basel Miami, and established galleries.
Sid Garrison (1954 -2021) was born in Wichita, KS. He lived and made art in San Francisco for over thirty years before moving back to Kansas in 2014. His early work embraced the challenge of creating wet-formed laminated leather vessels and wall hangings that were incised and spray-painted with acrylics. Committed to abstraction, he left the process-intensive leather art behind in the early 90s to work exclusively with the most basic of materials available - colored pencil drawings on paper. Square in format and abstract in content, these drawings became his most well-known body of work. Garrison’s work has been exhibited internationally in Japan, Australia and Canada. Nationally, it has been shown at Gallery Joe (Philadelphia), Knoedler & Co. Project Space (New York), Danese (New York), Limn Gallery (San Francisco), Patricia Sweetow Gallery (San Francisco) and Sherry Frumkin Gallery (Santa Monica). In addition to private collections, his work has been collected by the Wichita Art Museum, the Philbrook Museum of Art, the Arkansas Arts Center and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation.