PAUL CHERWICK | MARK HAGEN | TOBIAS PILS | MAEGHAN REID
April 8th – 30th, 2011
The Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present the work of Paul Cherwick, Mark Hagen, Tobias Pils, and Maeghan Reid April 8th through April 30th. The exhibition will include drawing, collage, painting and sculpture.
Paul Cherwick, a highly skilled craftsman, creates a world within a carefully carved three-foot sculpture. Often depicting mythic like figures that have been culled through a modern sensibility, Cherwick’s wood sculptures play with a notion of idolatry that seems both comforting and worrisome.
The function of the natural world takes form in the paintings of Mark Hagen. After folding into patterns a rough-hewn burlap, Hagen sets the supports out to be sun-bleached, then treated using irregularly folded plastic sheets, before finally being painted. According to Hagen the work illustrates geology’s Law of Superimposition or, as he describes it, the “slow, stupid accumulation of the same thing over time.”
Austrian artist Tobias Pils draws architectures of dream-like landscapes. His sparse and sinuous marks reveal the fragile materiality of the paper on which they appear. Lines cut back on themselves in regret and move across the blank spaces with urgency. As soon as something seems to materialize Tobias removes the rug from beneath his own work keeping it in a constant state of reorientation.
With an eye toward the lonely, Maeghan Reid’s collages conjure an odyssey of nomads, naturalists, pilgrims, émigrés, ornaments, oracles, rituals, totems, truth-seekers, and sooth-sayers. Reid employs old photographs, discarded bits of upholstery, toothpicks, and strips of satin with a fastidiousness that makes them appear to have surfaced and gathered themselves. Her process of collection is as telling as the collection itself, a quest to be completed alone.