Installation view
Bernard Chadwick
Flatfoot
June 5 - July 11, 2015
Opening Reception: Friday, June 5th 7-9pm
Klowden Mann is very pleased to present Flatfoot, a show of new work by Los Angeles based artist Bernard Chadwick, and Chadwick’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition features a series of small and moderately scaled works in oil on canvas, each based upon a distinct video still from a video piece created by Chadwick and two collaborators. The video represents a small moment of abstracted surfing, taken from the perspective of a participant observer in the water. Stills have been pulled and decided upon in a way that simultaneously creates pattern, rhythm, pleasure and rupture. Chadwick’s resulting paintings offer the casual fluidity of seeing familiar to anyone who has spent time in the ocean, while at the same time presenting a punk irreverence towards both their subject matter and the potentially petulant and insistent act of painting itself. Chadwick says, “We are talking about sticky, smelly paint, and it’s relationship to the subject of water. It is a particular kind of water, it’s a surfer’s kind of water. He floats on it, goes under it, is propelled by it, glides over it, is hit by it, is drowned by it, is pulled out to sea. It is disorientating, it is sensual. But what about flatness? There is something here with paint and all the talk about water and the surface both above and below the water that also points to flatness. Flatness as a condition, flatness as both a possibility and an impossibility. Flatness in relationship to the sublime, to the uncanny, to the expressive."
Concurrent with Flatfoot, the gallery project space will feature a collaborative exhibition entitled Sand is Glass. This is the first public showing of an ongoing long term collaboration between Chadwick and Kit Bessenbacher, in which the artists trade pieces back and forth and create visual responses to each other's work, in the vein of the surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse. Bessenbacher's ceramic work is often small and detailed with geometric patterns and sensual muted colors while Chadwick here uses tinted fiberglass resin, paint and wax to create flat wall works. The project is an exploration of an artistic camaraderie, a reaction of form and color into other mediums, and a study of how these things change and morph over a long period of time.
The exhibitions will take place from June 5th through July 11th, 2015, with an opening reception on Friday June 5th from 7 to 9pm. Limited edition posters and zines made by Chadwick for the occasion of the exhibition will be available at the opening reception on a first-come, first-served basis.
Bernard Chadwick is an artist and musician living and working in Los Angeles, California. He received his MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA, in 2010, where he focused on conceptual sound installation, with a final graduate exhibition titled Somewhere There’s Music. Chadwick uses video, performance, multimedia installation, sculpture and painting to create work that often relates the visual and the auditory in a manner that stems from his ongoing practice as both a visual artist and musician, and the desire to create experience functioning on multiple sensory levels.