The terrific sculptor Scott Fife, creates absolutely marvelous (masterful) large scale heads in cardboard -often grayed out -but this go around with big splashes of color, with all the workings -screws, glue, staples adding both detritus and, detail -in some ways reminiscent of Conrad Marca Relli's best work- made 3d. Scott will be showing with the interesting psychedelic abstractions of Todd Chilton -a painter The Shark knows nothing of, but looks forward to seeing-
Scott will not be at the opening -BUT! will be coming to Chicago in the next month to give a gallery talk -date TBA-
Todd Chilton, For January
Tony Wight Gallery is pleased to present, For January, an exhibition of new paintings by Todd Chilton. This will be Chilton's first solo exhibition with gallery.
Immediately and overtly hewn, Todd Chilton's abstractions are direct in their form and means. Chilton builds on his ubiquitous production of small notebook drawings that he then redraws, with paint, by hand directly onto the canvas. This form of translation insures a measure of imperfection to the paintings and their geometric structures that is resolutely human. His purposeful use of color, scale, and paint conveys a sense of humorous ambiguity through the determined imprecision of the broken and sagging structures, and the obvious hand that created them. Many of the paintings in For January are on a more intimate scale than Chilton's previous work yet they feel much larger than their actual size. Because of the compression imposed by the treatment of the edges, the paintings seem anxious, ready to escape their apparently cropped boundaries.
Todd Chilton (American, b. 1977) earned an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. He has recently mounted solo exhibitions at Raw & Co. in Cleveland, OH and The Suburban in Oak Park, IL. Group exhibitions include Young Moderns at the Gallery of Contemporary Art, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and Ps & Qs at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Running concurrent to For January, Chilton's work will be featured in a group exhibition at 65Grand in Chicago. ----- Scott Fife, Heads
Tony Wight Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculptural works by Scott Fife. This will be the Seattle-based artist's third solo exhibition with the gallery.
Scott Fife will present four new additions to his ongoing series of larger-than-life cardboard heads. The low-tech materials and laborious production of Fife's busts are in an odd tension with the glossiness of the cultural icons they depict. Rather than molding polished marble forms--like the classical busts of the Roman Republic that his works reference--Fife's constructions are roughly hewn from raw, gray, archival cardboard with screws, glue, and pencil markings all highly visible. These likenesses are an anxious proposition of the vital and the macabre.
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Among the works on view are two busts of the artist Ed Kienholz. These works are a slight departure for Fife in that Kienholz was not only a well-known artist but also a mentor and friend. Fife's depictions of Kienholz, one younger and one older, disclose his familiarity with his mentor's emotional stance and mannerisms. This knowledge results in two very direct and intimate descriptions of the man he knew. In contrast to the specificity present in the Kienholz pieces, a bust representing Cassius Clay (the future Mohamed Ali) is noticeably more stylized. A large portion of Clay's face has been treated with a florescent pink color, an emphatic nod towards Pop Art. In perhaps the most curious bust in the exhibition, a young Abraham Lincoln is pictured without facial hair.
Scott Fife (American, b. 1949) has shown widely both nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Scott Fife at the Tacoma Art Museum, Big Trouble: The Idaho Project at the Boise Art Museum, (Boise, Idaho) which traveled to the Salt Lake Art Center, (Salt Lake City, Utah) and Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture (Spokane, Washington). Group exhibitions include Beauty is Embarrassing at Western Project (Los Angeles); Frida Kahlo: Images of an Icon at the Tacoma Art Museum of Art (Tacoma, Washington); Swallow Harder: Selections from the Ben and Aileen Krohn Collection at the Frey Museum of Art (Seattle). In 2009, Fife will mount a solo exhibition at The Missoula Museum of Art in Montana.
Opening night --
Scott Fife @ Tony Wight:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/73059802@N00/3205136928/
Todd Chilton @ Tony Wight:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/73059802@N00/3205121522/