WESTERN EXHIBITIONS Dan Attoe 2009

Opening Reception: Friday, September 11, 5 to 8pm
Gallery Hours: Wednesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm

The shock rocker (and now horror film director) Rob Zombie’s floating head looms over 6 pairs of kayakers on a melancholy seascape in Dan Attoe’s new oil painting, “Sea Kayakers (You Are Not Special)”. The Zombie apparition, a recurring prophet in Attoe’s work, spouts a cryptic aphorism, in text delicately rendered by the artist. Is this phrase directed to us, the viewers, or to the kayakers, or both?

“Sea Kayakers (You Are Not Special)” anchors Dan Attoe’s solo show in Western Exhibitions Gallery 2. He will also present several “daily drawings”, an extension of a past project of making a small painting every day over a couple of years. In these drawings, Attoe illustrates whatever is holding his interest at the moment, be it a Far Side cartoon, rock and rollers, whatever happened in the local bar last night, a scene from one of the Pacific Northwest’s legendary strip clubs, or a depiction of the Pacific Northwest’s legendary topography. He uses these drawings as foundations for paintings and neon sculptures and makes them in a stream of consciousness manner, letting the images, text and ideas that pop into his head make their way onto the paper. Attoe states in a recent interview, available at the gallery, that “there is no overarching theme to my work, there are things that pop up frequently because of where I live, or because of things I was interested in as a kid, etc. I like to leave the subject matter open to interpretation.”

This is Dan Attoe’s second solo show with Western Exhibitions. The gallery also hosted his collaborative installation troupe Paintallica for a wild show in 2006. Attoe will be having a concurrent show at Peres Projects in Los Angeles, with whom he has had 5 prior solo shows. Other solo shows include MUSAC in Leon, Spain, Vilma Gold in London and 404 Arte Contemporanea in Naples. Group shows include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bordeaux, France, AMP in Athens, Galleria Maria de Cardenas in Milan, the Saatchi Gallery in London and the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. His work has been discussed in Artforum, Artforum.com, Contemporary, Paper, Los Angeles Times, Art Review and LA Weekly. Paintallica recently completed an installation at the Country Club gallery in Los Angeles. Dan Attoe received his MFA from the University of Iowa in 2004 and he lives and works just outside of Portland, Oregon.