Contemporary art gallery Quaid opens an exhibit called “Brown Dawn,” next weekend, and that’s interesting enough, but a show flyer from artist Anthony Record — whose paintings are an interruption that reflects the browsing and scrolling qualities of contemporary consciousness — is all kinds of WTF.
“’Brown Dawn’ is basically ‘This whole cracker ass dimension can kiss my ass’ in nuclear semiotics. It takes place on earth during the point at which dogs and cats start to literally talk,” it says before eventually landing at this TL:DR summary: “The paintings are dark and shadowy to reflect how all other things are so shady.”
Needless to say, Saturday’s opening is worth a trip to see just to find out what the hell is going on. The show runs until October 12. Sat. Sept. 21, 7 p.m.-10 p.m. Donations accepted. Quaid Gallery, 5128 N. Florida Ave., Tampa. INFO.
Read his full artist statement below.
My work has always been influenced by the primordial forms suggested by the kudzu-covered trees that line Florida’s highways most of the year. Those ambiguous shadowy forms, reminiscent of the birth of galaxies and the end of civilization, suggest to me simultaneously scenes from the distant past and the distant future. My paintings share many formal qualities with this kind of messy organic growth as a way of engaging with the sublime dread of deep time.
My work pulls from the visual languages and purposes of modernism, cartoons, memes, amateur photography, Chinese landscape painting, and calligraphy. Each painting starts as an improvised drawing with brush and ink on paper. These preliminary drawings suggest a multitude of images. Then, with ink or paint, I enlarge and edit them to make the imagery I see in the abstract marks more obvious and concrete while maintaining the creeping multistability of the original sketch.
In a world where most to all of our actions and desires have been anticipated and satisfied through data mining and algorithms, I strive to make things that are naturally hyper-ambiguous and inscrutable. My painting is an art of interruption that reflects the browsing and restless searching qualities of contemporary consciousness. The paintings are dark and shadowy to reflect how all other things are so shady.
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