Gallery Two, Chicago
In Gallery 2 at Western Exhibitions Avery Z. Nelson will present a group of new “cut-out” paintings, including those that they are installing, for the first time, perpendicular from the wall, making visible both sides of the painting.
Literally made by cutting into the canvas, Avery Z. Nelson’s paintings are made, in part, by cutting into and through the canvas, creating tension between their exuberantly painted surfaces and loaded negative spaces. Nelson’s razor blade slices and obliterates, creating holes and negative spaces, leaving the canvas and painted surfaces fragmented and disjointed. Pieces of canvas push outside the frame, surrender to the frame, decorate the frame, wrap the frame, hang off the frame, and work to collapse the frame. The color scheme of each painting is specific to the timbre or mood of the painting, and feeling and intuition are pitted against a formal investigation of stillness, emptiness and the frame. In a charged dialogue with the constructed surfaces of gesture and paint, the negative spaces become voids, opening the site of painting beyond the frame.
Avery Z. Nelson (b. 1983, Rhinebeck, NY) received an MFA from Columbia University (2009) and a BA from Barnard College (2006). Nelson has exhibited at galleries in New York, Chicago and Milwaukee, including Lloyd Dobler Gallery, Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center, NURTUREart, and Usable Space. Their work was selected for the 2011 and 2013 Midwest editions of New American Paintings, and they were awarded a Community Arts Assistance Program grant in 2012. Nelson recently returned from The Lighthouse Works residency on Fishers Island (NY), and currently lives and works in Chicago.