Garry Noland Loot Box
Garry Noland
Loot Box
April 23 - May 17th
Garry Noland’s, Loot Box, paintings and photographic collages leave the viewer betwixt and between. He shapeshifts from one process to another and even includes his great-grandmother’s rugs in his installation. Is there a personal message from the artist in this cacophony of materials and color? Is there a thread that courses through the diversity and progression of his artwork?
Subtle as Noland may be, he has overarching concerns about certain subjects about which he feels deeply. It is important to note that Noland is also an art historian, writer, and curator, as well as an informal mentor to many young artists. His practice cuts a broad swath into the history of Western art as well as his own ancestral heritage, resulting in art that is introspective as well as part homage and part discourse.
His Plan-0-Gram paintings, Novelty Landscapes, and Estella Renick’s handmade rag rugs reference some of the dominant art investigations of the last 100 years. Everything from baking soda to acrylic, latex, and spray paint make up his ode to process art in his multi-layered Plan-O-Gram wallworks, along with citations to wall sculpture and post-minimalism.
The rag rugs, allusions to the Pattern and Decoration movement, honor not just the overlooked craft of women’s art but that of laborers in general. And his Novelty Landscapes have the wry wit of the Picture generation, artists who challenged the veracity of what is portrayed in the media.
Underscoring all this is his conviction that the present is informed by the past, even when our culture acknowledges only vestigial aspects of our history. Noland has said that he is just one of a long line of artists who have shaped the aesthetic record, and he builds on what others have done before. In his Plan-O-Gram works, the top colorful geometric elements are stacked upon layers of materials that waver between the pretty and the discarded. We may not know exactly what is inside that pile, but the top forms could not exist without that support.
In earlier work, Noland challenged the legitimacy of certain facts being portrayed as the truth in everything from maps to scientific journals. In his Novelty Landscapes, he seamlessly juxtaposes scenes that don’t belong together, although it takes a minute for the viewer to recognize that. In “Novelty Landscape (Ohio),” a bucolic family scene from the sixties is juxtaposed with a mountainscape in the distance. There are any number of possible surreal takes on this work, now that we know that notions of the perfect white family in mid-century America were often false.
Paintings on Pedestals also comment on concepts of family, as Noland resurfaces family cabinet doors he grew up with. These pieces complicate any single take on familial tropes, because here he takes standard doors and adorns them. His great-grandmother’s rag rugs are inherited treasures. Once again, Noland reveals that our personal past also informs our present, and implies that it is our duty to expand, even improve upon, that which has shaped us, as well as acknowledge the unseen, underappreciated efforts of those who have molded us. As Noland tells us again and again, there is no one right answer in life’s complicated scenarios, but we do better if we look back as opposed to moving forward as fast as we can.
-Elisabeth Kirsch
Elisabeth Kirsch is an art historian, curator and writer who has curated over 80 exhibitions and written numerous essays and critiques for art magazines, museums and galleries throughout the country.
Artist Statement
My studio practice is multi-disciplinary. The one constant is an openness to rough
patches, glitches, or mistakes. The presence of edges or boundaries between mistakes
establishes immediate contextual and formal relationships. Those abutments mime
our interaction with art and with each other. Closer attention is paid to the verbs of
making than to the finality of the resulting noun of the object. What happens when
something is put next to something else is the thing.
What goes with what? What happens on either side of the line? What’s good and who
decides? Sometimes I am the boss of the material, but just as often, the material, by
virtue of chance arrangements, will tell me what needs to be done.
Art puns and mimes the systems and appearances we experience in both the non-
human and human parts of nature. The oft-quoted role of the free press is "to afflict
the comfortable and comfort the afflicted". Art's first cousin role, then, is to find the
mundane in the grand and the grand in the mundane.