ERICA WHEELOCK
&
NATHAN
WATSON
SHADES OF GREY
JULY 2-AUGUST 3, 2009
Opening reception: Thursday, July 2 , from 6 to 9 pm
NOMA GALLERY is pleased to present Shades of Grey, an exhibition featuring works by Erica Wheelock and Nathan Watson.
In the words of artist/writer Michele Carlson: "Upon entering the gallery one is taken by the balance struck between Nathan Watson’s minimal white on white plaster drawings and sculpture and Erica Lee Wheelock’s frantic layered black on white ink drawings. Shades of Grey brings together the works of two artists who navigate their own personal landscapes in order to create new possibilities, suggest alternative visions and refigure common perception. They come from different directions: Wheelock creates landscapes that are fantastical suggestions of what could be and Watson isolates and abstracts symbols in the visual landscape to suggest new alternatives. Both artists meet in the middle and demonstrate that what one sees and where one is going has many shades, layers and versions.
Working with dry wall, Watson recreates life-sized sections of fences, brick walls, and frames. These segments of barriers become moments of time and space that are quite literally frozen, carved, stacked, and attached to the walls of the gallery.
Where Watson scours the existing landscape in order to reframe the meaning behind many of its dominant symbols, Wheelock reinvents them. She collects moments from everywhere and anyone. And then she lets it all out on paper. She is an archivist gone wild, who has pillaged the galleys of her personal collection of life’s details in order to make sense of the world around her—a lifetime full that she has diligently archived in her personal and of course her hard drive’s memory. Her black and white drawings illustrate the collision of time, space, and memory.