Landon Metz Varying Degrees of Absurdity, Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Los Angeles, 2013
22nd November – 18th January 2014 NEW Address Rod Barton, 41-45 Consort Road SE15 3SS www.rodbarton.com
Artists
Ross Iannatti, Dylan Lynch, Torey Thornton, Morgan-Richard Murphey, Grear Patterson, Landon Metz
co-curated with Jonathan Ellis King
“I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.”
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said.
“One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen.
“When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
(Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 1871)
Rod Barton is to present the inaugural show at the gallery’s second London space entitled Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.
This exhibition brings together six artists who share commonality and focus in abstraction and formal possibility. From a counter-perspective, their aesthetic outcomes are the result of the destruction of their inherent visual language and form. In this sense, they become counter-productive or ‘impossibilities’.
The works in this exhibition adhere to both the disruption and corruption of imagery in terms of traditional aesthetic prospect. For these artists, process and experience become over-sensitised, awareness and control of materiality assume power, aesthetic form and possibility open towards a paradigm shift; yet visual potency remains.
Demonstrated by the various media on display, the works collectively articulate the insecurity and hesitancy of artistic production and traditional form through demolishing the very symbol of possibility. Both possible and impossible states of forms are free-handedly within reach, opportunity is there to be seized, and current artistic boundaries being expanded and yielded.
