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statement for 'New Paintings' 2012 exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery:
Cars in the landscape
"Cars are everywhere, and
nowhere. As a person who paints
the built environment, cars have usually eluded me, because while they are
built, they are not fixed. Earlier
on in my work I cropped them out of my paintings. I thought that nothing says less about a place than the cars
on the roads that go through that place- “through” being the operative word
here. But in my heart I knew this
wasn’t true. As a child in the
1980s my family would make visits to Cleveland and my sister and I had a name
for the cars we saw in Cleveland, which became our word for a certain type of
car- “Cleveland cars”. These were old American models that were kept alive by
some mechanical wizardry that could only have been honed by the generations of
industrial laborers. The bodies
were rusted out and they blew smoke but they were on the road. To this day Ohio is a state that does
not require an annual inspection, except strangely only in Cleveland.
Then I bought a car and I
became sympathetic to cars.
Driving became a new way of seeing the landscape. Can one be a flâneur in a car or around
cars? The American pastime of The
Sunday Drive says so. But as oil
becomes scarce, most people go out with a purpose, and that is not flânerie at
all (no matter how contaminated flânerie has become). How are we to discover
the places where we live if we don’t explore?
Where cars are included in
the tradition of realist urban landscape painting they are an afterthought,
dashed off with a few quick marks.
But after some attention they appear quite attractive to the painter of
surfaces and details. They bear
congruities to my other obsessions in the urban environment, namely surface
reflections. Car designs go though
cycles. Where once cars were
angular and matte, recent car designs form the car’s angles into seamless
gentle curves and glassy colored surfaces, flecked with tiny metallic
particles. This causes reflections
to tint and bend, morphing psychedelically, but most of all to become
heightened.
In the northeastern U.S.
city, cars congregate on the edge, in the suburban area (“fringe” is the word
that has entered the lexicon, since we are speaking now of marginal
groups). Bright colorful
industrial signage serves a purpose: to mark the vast open spaces. Car dealerships employ the banners to
gather glances from passing drivers.
These form a shimmering and wanly smiling catenary high above the
lot. These found sculptural
installations are a visual delight on an otherwise flat gray plain. The banners’ uniformity and repetition
mimic the cars, themselves the impetus, and result, of the assembly line. But I want to cast these cars in the
light of the personal, the marked upon, the beloved and specific. Not by representing figures, but
thinking of how when I return to my car and see it down the block where I
parked, it is like meeting a good friend.
I know all of its features.
In the rush to localize and
downsize, there is something sad about thinking of the car (as we know it)
becoming the dinosaur of the 20th century. The newness of a car is only new for a short time. Its newness is ephemeral- like the old
saying “a car loses half its value as soon as you drive it off the lot”. There is a portent of death in the dark
night that hangs over the brand new Hyundai Velosters in the South Philly
lot. It will take a return of
American wizardry to rescue them from the junk heap of history."
Daina Higgins
December 2011
statement for 'environs' 2009 exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery:
“The title 'environs'
alludes to my ongoing exploration of the suburbs of New York and other major
cities. While the paintings do not focus on the heroic side of New York
best understood by tourists, they match these subjects (i.e. the Brooklyn
Bridge, Lower Manhattan, etc.) in visual drama. What I choose to focus on
are things seen on the periphery. I am interested in the idea of the 'center
and margins' of the physical layout of the city. Most of the country has
developed into endless suburbs but in New York there is still the idea of a
'center'- namely, Manhattan. My work could be considered an archive of
the margins, as a place of dynamic, shifting hybridism and change. I am
interested in a kind of poetic awareness of the shapes and textures of the
outer boroughs.
Part of my choices of
subjects are motivated by the idea of using paint to describe paint-like
objects. I am particularly attracted to banners because they
are really nothing more than flat pieces of color, and cakes are
architectural and painterly at the same time. And while there is a range
of subjects the common thread running through them is that they all
tend to be ephemeral objects, from buildings in a state of destruction or
entropic decay, to cheap plastic thrills, reflections, rainbows, graffiti, and
food. Even a disposable structure like Shea Stadium, quickly built for
the 1964 World's Fair and just as quickly torn apart, takes up a more permanent
place in the memories of those who visited there and cherished its shabbiness
and underdog status.” Daina Higgins, 2009
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