Supper Club

Merlin Carpenter, Ruth Angel Edwards, Bendix Harms, Fox Hysen, Andy Meerow, Olivia van Kuiken

Curated by Reilly Davidson

As It Stands is pleased to present Supper Club, a group exhibition.

One painting per wall. Resolute and just there. This exhibition has been an investigative endeavor, rather than a didactic one (thank you to Marcia Tucker for graciously outlining the difference).

Depending on which way you move through the gallery there is a complete and utter breakdown of the picture plane, or else a complete assembly of it.

The studio is a site for divulsion, transgression, acceptance, rejection, anxiety, cataclysm, and discovery. What can be accomplished within the limitations of a canvas? Painting has already undergone critique and self-critique many times over. Now that we’ve collectively reached what Matt Saunders refers to as a “post-post-post-studio world,” there is a sense of freedom in exploration. The artist is in freefall, or else floating in a vast expanse of everything goes.

I’m returning to Marcia Tucker again as she reminds me to meet art on its own terms, instead of expecting it to meet me where I’m at.

Nowadays I see too many images posing as paintings. Inert pictures placed on canvas with brush and oil. I don’t think this is a new problem by any means, though. Saunders posits: “Painting may be beyond itself, whether it is networked or digital or post or neo, but it’s still standing in some of the same clothes.”

Chiefly, no one here is offering “solutions” to the ongoing “death of painting,” instead opting for an autonomous mode of artmaking. I am interested in the way that the selected artists leverage their own internal frequencies and calibrate them in accordance with the external world (cultural conditions, market landscape, networks of artists), as well as the way in which each artist has a strong sense of painting that is beside itself, always becoming. I am motivated by the idea of mapping out these alignments in space.

I don’t want a painting to answer too many questions. I want to wonder the whole time I’m looking at it and then after I’ve left the room and am ejected back out onto the street.

I think that I might be searching and wondering for the rest of my life. This is a frustration and a pleasure at once.

—Reilly Davidson