DARREN WATERSTON: Recent Paintings and Works on Paper and NIGEL POOR: The Relative Value of Things
April 23 – June 13, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 2, 2009, 3:00 – 5:00 pm

Darren Waterston’s recent abstract paintings in his sixth solo exhibition at Haines Gallery bear titles, such as Beata, Mineral Forest, Assumption, Nightbloom, that hint at the artist’s preoccupation with otherworldly exploration. Mere titles, however, are inadequate for describing the luminous, mysterious images that appear to have been painted with tinted air rather than with oil paint on wood. Recent Paintings and Works on Paper includes nine large panels and a salon-style hanging of several framed works on paper and small panel paintings.

In conjunction with the exhibition at Haines Gallery, Splendid Grief: Darren Waterston and the Afterlife of Leland Stanford, Jr. will be exhibited at Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California, April 15-July 5, 2009. Events related to these exhibitions are Thursday, April 23 at 6:30 pm, film screening and discussion at Cantor Arts Center Auditorium of “Our Darling Boy: The Brief Life of Leland Stanford, Jr.” with discussion between Artist Darren Waterston; Art Department Professor Kristine Samuelson; and Stanford M.F.A. documentary film students Mike Attie and Melanie Vi Levy; Tuesday, April 28, at 5:30 pm at Haines Gallery, Conversation between Darren Waterston and Timothy Anglim Burgard, Ednah Root Curator of American Art at de Young Museum about Waterston’s exhibition.

In his early work, Waterston was highly influenced by a landscape tradition ranging from Albrecht Altdorfer, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Japanese painting of the Edo Period (1603-1867) to Kandinsky and Kupka. His early paintings began with careful observations that he transformed into nature obliquely depicted and marked by a kind of visual instability. Of the recent work, Waterston says, “My current artistic practice is very much about trying further to disengage from material embodiment, or even to ‘represent’ that disengagement….I set out to construct illusionary spaces that point to another dimension, reality, or sensation of the infinite, always undermining the picture plane. Expressing the nature of this ineffable space requires abstraction, even when it is not labeled as such. The representation of light, refraction, and atmosphere, which has been a constant in my work, has now taken center stage.”

Today Waterston uses geological, botanical, and celestial influences to suggest creation myths, cycles of life and decay and sub-molecular structures, alchemic narrative, or the internal space of psychology or spirituality. Over and undertones of allegory and apocalyptic visions reveal truths about the past, present, and future.

NIGEL POOR
The Relative Value of Things

In Nigel Poor’s The Relative Value of Things, her fourth solo exhibition at Haines Gallery, the artist expands her long-time interest in collecting into a logical next step-throwing things out. Using photographs, text, artist’s books, a cell phone tour, and an interactive Web site, Poor dissects her philosophy of discarded items and beguilingly invites the viewer to participate in her ongoing exploration. The exhibition includes thirty-six books, eight photographic triptychs, and panels of hair and lint that document everything of value or no value that the artist has gotten rid of for the past several years. The covers of the books, which are made of hair or lint, establish the “no value” limit and contrast with the relative value of the contents. The books are meant to be seen on a wall, hung in sets of twelve. The back cover comprises twelve panels that form one complete image called Someday I Will Be as Insignificant as a Swarm of Summer Insects. Shown as grids of twelve, the book collections change as books are removed or collected, thus illustrating both the concept of the project and the human condition of trying to organize and understand what will eventually slip away. Poor produced this work during an artist residency at the San Francisco Center for the Book.

The artist has also included two imaginative components, a cell phone tour and an interactive Web site that further explains her commitment to her subject and invite the viewer to respond. The cell phone tour, innovative in gallery use but similar to those used in museums, is a guided narration in which Nigel Poor talks about her process of throwing things out. The interactive website, www.nigelpoor-relativevalue.com, will encourage viewers to list items they have thrown away along with photographs and their own feelings about getting rid of things. The artist plans to make a piece out of the information collected on the website.

Poor thinks of herself as an artist whose principal work is collecting. As a child in Boston, Poor says she filled her closet with shoeboxes, carefully marked to reflect her personal associations. A box labeled “miscellaneous” for things she “couldn’t quite make sense of” held the greatest fascination. At Bennington College (B.A. 1986) where Poor became interested in the relationship between visual and textual systems of recording and making meaning, she chose a double major in literature and photography. While studying photography at Massachusetts College of Art (M.F.A. 1992) Poor worked for the entomology department at the Harvard Museum of Contemporary Zoology, pinning insects into specimen drawers. She found this experience of cataloguing, sorting, and finding value in the everyday object so compelling that she has continued to use photography and writing as a way to explore her fascination with these processes.

For more information please visit our website at www.hainesgallery.com or contact Monique Deschaines, Director of Communications at 415.397.8114 or email at monique@hainesgallery.com.