While focusing on works on paper, a medium that Dan Shaw-Town exhibited almost exclusively from 2008 until 2011, he became preoccupied with “flatness as a physical condition rather than an assigned value.” The current exhibition presents six works, each of which consists of a six-foot tall painting on aluminum panel inset within a hot-rolled steel frame. Two of the paintings include a ten-foot, horizontal rail mounted to the wall directly in front of their surfaces. Using similar media, palette, and scale, the works are a fugue of permutations, a record of penumbral actions.
Though the core of Shaw-Town’s practice remains the expanded field of drawing, he has developed a contingent set of skills, which include a combination of folding, rubbing, transferring, masking, and layering. In this new body of work his process involves ironing the newsprint on a section of the panel prepared with spray enamel. The heat from the iron causes the xylene in the paint to transfer the ink from the newsprint to the prepared aluminum surface. The newsprint appears on the surfaces, an obfuscated memory in an accumulation of paint, text and untouched surfaces, overlapping passages of which question the line between manual process and extant material.
The exhibition will open with a reception from 6-9pm on Friday 8 March.
Dan Shaw-Town is an artist based in New York City. A graduate of Goldsmiths, his recent exhibitions include a three-person exhibition with Ned Vena and Davis Rhodes at Bugada Cargnel, Paris. A selection of his drawings is currently on view as part of “Graphite,” an exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. In 2012 the artist participated in a two-person exhibition at Room East with Ben Schumacher, and has previously exhibited at Lisson Gallery, London; Team Gallery, New York; Christopher Crescent, London; and Unosunove, Rome.
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