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Gary Michael Dault - Landscapes and Fragments
This GE print was released as a promotional item on the occasion of Gary Michael Dault's exhibition - LANDSCAPES AND FRAGMENTS: An Ordering of Events. An exhibition held at INDEXG, Toronto, starting from February 17 to March 14, 2010.
Written by the artist, "the exhibition’s Fragments are, for the most part, irregularly-shaped bits of cardboard, bearing unruly splashes, droppings, stains, smudges and wipings of the acrylic pigment I was then using to paint my Sixty-second Cereal Box Landscapes, a series of works I began some years ago, and which continues.
Many of these fugitive Fragments began simply as hunks of cardboard I was using as tools—as wipers, for example—which I would then let fall to my studio floor. Each of them invariably carried chaotic but inescapably sensuous pile-ups of paint (as well as passages of commercial printing and other visual incidents from the former life of the cardboard). I found these so attractive in their own right, it became almost impossible to part with them.
As an act of (re)claiming them, I assisted each of them—sometimes only very slightly (a stroke here, a slather there)—into a new primary life as a painting on its own: each fragment, now chosen and anointed by deliberation, thereby stopped being a castoff part of something else and became a thing on its own.
The exhibition’s Landscapes, though many of them began, admittedly, as generative visual accidents or unlooked for paint events, are more about painting per se than they are about backing into painting as a byproduct of another activity (as with the Fragments). As such, they are centripetal works—as opposed to the flyaway centrifugal works that are the Fragments."
