Bob Dylan once argued, “paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men’s rooms.” Instead, sadly, it’s rare to see fine painting and sculpture outside of pristine galleries. Perhaps for that reason, artists often choose materials that imply a connection with the messier world outside the museum. One such is found metal, which Alabama-born painter Drew Galloway uses to good effect. He cuts and collages pieces of naturally distressed tin to create multi-paneled, irregular surfaces on which he paints tranquil scenes of streams, ponds and bayous from the Southern landscape he knows. The images have a limpid clarity, but he sometimes leaves portions of the metal unpainted, resulting in works that merge the accidental with the intentional. Similarly, Gordon Chandler’s witty and colorful found-object sculptures (of mounted deer heads, for example) show their material’s provenance as pieces of junkyard or roadside debris.
Tuesdays-Saturdays. Starts: July 25. Continues through Sept. 5, 2009
