Mike Swaney
HUT 1 PAINTINGS 4
Opening: 6 febrero 2014. 20:00h
BLOKKER GALLERY
Calle Espalter 5 - Madrid
+34 914203932
The title of Mike Swaney's first solo show at Blokker is clear and concise; in this case it's a head to head between painting and installation. The 'hut' - his largest installation to date, is accompanied by four medium format acrylic paintings on unprimed canvas fill the gallery.
Swaney collects and transforms modern day folklore in his work: objects, design, text, newspaper clippings, window displays, decorations, and functional apparatus made by everyday people are all embedded into the code of the exhibition. Painting in a limited palette of African or Jamaican-like colors, Mike paints spontaneously with an expressionist attitude. The 4 paintings reference a wide range of themes and formal languages; Catalan and Spanish imagery from the 16-19th century, Persian 16th century painting, carpet design from the Pazyryk Culture (5th-4th century BC), Pre-Columbian motifs, Outsider Art aesthetics, but also online culture are channelled into one visual stream.
The hut installation provides a surreal environment, separate from the gallery space yet inside of it, which allows the viewer to navigate their way through a set of rooms that are reminiscent of an online surfing experience of net shops or personal blogs. The hut is filled with ´decorations´ or ´inventory´ which appear to be on display, for sale, or that simply belong to someone’s private collection of prize possessions. The artists seems to want to archive some of this online nostalgia, in the form of objects, paintings, paraphernalia and assemblages that recollect modes of display and aesthetic from the internet world. This is, in a way, a means to preserving these images of internet culture. This attempt stems from the belief that, as much as platforms such as fotolog, myspace, etc. have become obsolete and overpowered by newer, more popular platforms, the Internet as we know it today, too will soon be a thing of the past.
*The exhibition also includes works from Spanish Outsider Artists from the Asociacio Zubietxe center in Bilbao as a means of provoking conversation about the art world's growing interest in "marginal arts". The increased acknowledgement is possibly due to Art Brut imagery becoming more widespread on the internet. The marginal works in the hut are encased in a vitrine and are untouchable to the viewer, the idea being to place them on a prestigious level, as equivalent works of art to those of contemporary artists.
