Existing between hand-finished and mass-produced objects, Sterling Lawrence’s recent body of work includes large inkjet-print gradients and sculptural forms resembling furniture.

The sculptures are reminiscent of furniture but deprived of their imagined utility: unplugged lamps, empty tables and coat racks without coats. They alternate between formal sculpture and furniture, between the attribution of meaning and the attribution of use, addressing the definition of sculpture, its outward form and function.

Lawrence’s prints and sculpture create an absorptive environment. The gradients are printed on backlit film traditionally used in transparency boxes. The translucent material shows the color of the wall, imitates the banding of interior lighting and fills the nearby space with its particular hue. The sculptures take the color of their environment while the prints fluctuate between a backdrop and a potential image, projecting color out into the space, all with an underlying tension: Where am I supposed to stand?

If the story ever had a start it might go like this:

The horizon is always receding.
Practice is like washing.
The more you practice the more you can see how much more you have to work

Sterling Lawrence was born in Grants Pass, Oregon and lives and works in Chicago. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Tony Wight Gallery is pleased to present Ineluctable, an exhibition of photographs by Barbara Kasten. Barbara Kasten’s newest series of abstract photographs records the consequential traces of light upon large-scale assemblages composed for the camera. Instead of using photography as record or reference, the physical object, which is the transparent Plexiglas plane, becomes immaterial. Light and shadow becomes the subject.

The work in this exhibition also includes works from the 1970s – unique cyanotypes, Polaroid’s, and drawings on photographic paper. Through various photographic processes investigated over the last four decades Kasten continues to show a remarkable consistency of interest in challenging and experimenting with elements of transparency, color, light and structure.

As one of the preeminent photographers working today, Kasten continues to affect a recent generation in the exploration of the foundations of photography. Kasten’s own interest in light developed out of the conceptual concerns of painting, sculpture and installation influenced by early exposure to the work of artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell.

Barbara Kasten (American, b. 1936) has exhibited her work nationally and internationally since the 1970s. She received her BFA in painting and sculpture from the University of Arizona in Tucson and her MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Kasten is the recipient of many prestigious awards including a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and her work has been widely exhibited by major museums in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Her photographs are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; International Center of Photography, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum; Museum of Modern art, Lodz, Poland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. She lives and works in Chicago, IL

This exhibition will focus on the obfuscation and confusion that takes place when gestures and signs are fragmented, layered, concealed, dampened and stifled, and the simultaneous opacity and openendedness which ensues.

Talia Chetrit’s pictures make use of traditional photographic props such as lamps, black velvet, discarded paper and the human body. Despite their apparent simplicity, her silver gelatin prints transform rather ordinary studio materials into pictures that are surprisingly elusive. Chetrit’s minimalist pictures mine the history of photography, pushing against the boundaries of the medium while unabashedly referencing and repurposing historic precedents. Even in her more iconic compositions (for instance Mask or Fist/Glove, both 2009), Chetrit’s images maintain an open-ended, almost cryptic quality. Her photographs knowingly skirt declaration as they invite us to ruminate not only on the ways in which we read images but also the various techniques and processes that go into their construction.

Daniel Gordon’s pictures begin with the Internet. Gordon scours the web for images, which he then prints out, cuts apart and assembles into sophisticated, yet makeshift, sculptural tableaus. The tableaus are then lit and photographed in one definitive shot. After each shot is completed, Gordon disassembles his ephemeral constructions, the components of which are discarded into clusters on his studio floor. These remnants are often used again in future pictures, creating an ebb and flow of material and activity not unlike the Internet itself—a nebulous field of interconnections, continuously shifting in density. As indicated by their titles, the pictures that Gordon has selected for this exhibition were each completed in a single day.

Work by Matthew Metzger in the South Gallery.

The three paintings in this exhibition explore the dependency and exchangeability within Figuration and Abstraction as a method to portray the liminal and fleeting qualities that compose aspects of being. Utilizing many of Abstraction’s familiar tropes – flatness, separate and pure color planes, and “pulled” paint – Metzger alternately depicts a worn Home Depot carrying cart, a tattered walking cane, and a scuba “diver down” emblem as signs through which to consider the possibilities that open at the breach of one’s capabilities, the very moments when the body forgoes control and accepts the weight of exterior forces.

In Anthropometry, Untitled, Metzger renders countless scuffs and abrasions that have collectively accumulated on the surface of a Home Depot carrying cart. These marks that remain become traces of one’s inability to lift and transport materials that are both produced for and within a “do-it-yourself” context. Here, notions of originality and authorship are submissive to the illusory qualities of paint, while the fatigued surface of the cart points to the submission of bodies under the weight of commodities. Metzger’s Performance Corridor features a walking cane positioned vertically against a black and white abstraction. The height of the painting is limited to the maximum height of the cane rendered, as its width embodies that of Bruce Nauman’s Performance Corridor, originally constructed for his work Walking With Contrapposto. As Nauman sways slowly up and down his corridor, he is forced to halt at each bodily shift in order to retain the frozen stance of Greek and Roman sculpture. A pause that becomes crucial in witnessing the juncture between one’s historical lineage and the present. For Metzger, that pause is removed as the cane allows one to maintain the contrapposto stance while in the process of movement. The painting, The Dead Man (The Dead Toreador), capitalizes on the scuba “diver down” emblem’s normative role as an alert for boaters to take notice of the waters occupied by a diver. By recontextualizing the emblem as a “geometric abstraction” situated within the literal frame of Edouard Manet’s The Dead Man (The Dead Toreador), Metzger calls attention to the problem of occupancy, regarding both the duration in which one inhabits a space, as well as the contexts in which one chooses to paint. That being said, the notion of occupancy becomes linked to the “memento mori”, a reminder of the temporary nature of existence.

Mining the content of depiction and abstraction, Arturo Herrera and David Schutter show in their independent pairs how sameness and difference are often co-dependent. In a pair of painted collages by Herrera, or a pair of drawings on prepared paper by Schutter, identical replications are an admitted impossibility that the artists sublimate instead toward meditations on hybridity, deviation, and historical re-enactment. Both artists rework and re-investigate the idea of “duplication” in their presented pairs, creating a series of intersections. Their resultant works are more dialectical than binary or narrative, in this regard, and each work in the exhibition metaphorically functions like the double-images of the stereo-scope, in which depth can only be perceived by viewing the two images together.

The central series in the exhibition is LW’s the Sea, which translates statements from a text piece by Lawrence Weiner into five discreet paintings. Finneran has reordered the statements as titles for his paintings: To the Sea, Bordering the Sea, At the Sea, On the Sea, and From the Sea. These paintings are built around the specificity of the language in the titles, the positioning of the self to the sea. Rather than a pictorial interpretation of Weiner’s piece, Finneran’s paintings offer a psychological interpretation of what the statements feel like.

The title of the exhibition conflates a practical description of a type of spatial device present in the painting Bordering the Sea—a literal border which describes an interior rectangle set inside the rectangle of the panel itself—and a perceptual border enforced by the aluminum ground’s resistance to light absorption. Finneran’s metal surfaces are themselves borders, holding us aside from a visual trip to another place. They hold us in front of something like the sea. Immense, impassive and patient. This is whatever is outside of us, everything besides us.

The photograph is almost automatically understood for its ability to capture the world at large, compressing whatever lies within range of the camera into a unified image; contained, continuous and even. This exhibition presents a group of artists that utilize this static notion of the photographic image not as a means to an end, but rather as a point of departure. Their works call attention to how photographs (and pictures, more generally) are constructed and considered inside the studio and out in the world.

An exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Allison Schulnik in the south gallery.

The four paintings featured in Home for Hobo Too are slathered so thickly with paint that the term “impasto” seems inadequate. Schulnik’s characters are a sorry group—hobos, clowns, losers, vermin, withering flowers—that, when teamed with her intensely expressionistic paint handling, result in images that are simultaneously anxious and dreamy, tragic and endearing. In the artist’s words, these paintings “blend earthly fact, blatant fiction and lots of oil paint to form a stage of tragedy, farce, and raw, ominous beauty—at times capturing otherworld buffoonery, and other times presenting a simple earthly dignified moment.”

Old Codes is comprised of ten works — an LCD panel displaying a hyperreal vanitas still life constantly (yet almost imperceptibly) in flux; four prints that each average dozens of portraits by an Old Master (Rembrandt, Hals, van Dyke and Velazquez); two prints of fictional computer-generated skulls; two prints that quantize the palettes of select paintings by Monet and Rubens and organize the results in concentric squares; and a digital projection of visual patterns derived from a backlog of the artist’s own Internet search history. The works in this exhibition, while varied greatly in both form and concept, all offer new perspectives on the intersection of art history and contemporary existence. Salavon continues to bring meaningful structures forward, sampling from the dense field of visual and statistical debris that surrounds us.

Robyn O’Neil’s obsessively detailed drawings have become widely known for their pointed and metaphorical investigations of such inauspicious thematics as the apocolypse, evolution, mass disaster and extinction. O’Neil’s earlier works were often densely populated and epic in scale with communities of little men in uniform tracksuits parading around desolate landscapes, seemingly unaware of the danger their surroundings presented. As this series progressed, the turbulence of their environment became increasingly palpable. Ultimately, O’Neil concluded the eight-year saga with a drawing of the sole surviving member of the community hanging tenuously over a tumultuous ocean, the extinction of the little men was imminent.

In O’Neil’s latest series, the dire trajectory of her previous narrative begins to destabilize, the drawings becoming increasingly iconic, poetic and dream-like. Rather than signaling a new found hope, these images create an emotional ambience that suggests an uncertain future. The world is unhinged and dismantled. Each drawing is able to function like an individual song or poem that may or may not relate to the drawings hung around it. Released from an explicit narrative, these works revel in the formal qualities of drawing.