“Process, Procedure, Presence”
Creativity as a concept pulls truth from both the left and right sides of the universe; it’s a little magic and a little mechanics. Some artists skew towards raw, Promethean creativity, and others toward more iterative or rule-based modes. There’s no right answer because art has “answers.” But while an artist’s journey has no destination; they will tell you there’s a place, or “pocket,” that combines the perfect ratios of left/right; objective/subjective; imagination/planning; and conscious/subconscious thinking. And while in that place, making artwork feels like ecstasy. It feels like it’s making itself, and that the artist becomes almost a pure medium.
The artists in “Process, Procedure, and Presence” each live and make right down the middle of this wonderful artistic duality, producing magical and uncanny objects combining rules and techniques with inspired and dreamy visions. Each piece in the show is part chemistry and part alchemy, arriving at the most fertile place in the universe: the edge of two things that don’t ever resolve.
Target Practice 2016-2025
by Stephen Maine
Stephen Maine’s work involves a print-like method, applying paint to canvas by way of intermediary textured surfaces that function as printing plates. He has produced dozens of such plates and continues to use most of them; a given plate will yield an indefinite number of paintings of similar composition (apart from the color relationships involved, which are unique to each painting). The paintings in the Target Practice series are made from a plate fabricated and first used in 2016. The artist has returned to this plate often, as he enjoys the way its imprint provokes ambiguity between figure and ground—a classic high-modernist trope of special interest for him. For years, the arbitrary distribution of roughly circular blobs suggested a field of craters or a lunar surface but lately has taken on new associations with bullet-riddled road signs. Target practice is a pretty good metaphor for his operations in the studio, as Maine is always trying to get closer to that bull’s eye. This exhibition includes a selection of Target Practice paintings from the past ten years.
Stephen Maine is a painter who lives and works in West Cornwall, Connecticut. From 1982 until 2017, he was based in New York City (and, for a few years, in Jersey City), and his approach to process-oriented, color-centric abstraction is shaped by that experience. His recent paintings have been seen at Pazo Fine Art in Washington, DC; Flinn Gallery, Greenwich, Connecticut; Private Public Gallery, Hudson, New York; Furnace/Art on Paper Archive, Falls Village, Connecticut; and in New York City at Satchel Projects, Hionas Gallery, John Molloy Gallery, Westbeth Gallery, Project: ARTspace, and Art Cake. His work is in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, the New York Public Library, Yale University Art Galleries, and the Museum of Modern Art Library Special Collection.
Maine’s solo exhibitions have been reviewed in ARTnews, Artcritical.com, the Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats of Paint, and The New Criterion. He has received support from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2000) and Yaddo (2012) and is a longstanding member of American Abstract Artists and the International Association of Art Critics. Maine’s writing has appeared regularly in Art in America, Artnet Magazine, the New York Sun, ARTnews, Art on Paper, Artillery, Artcritical.com, and Hyperallergic.com. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, Hartford Art School, and Purchase College SUNY. Maine holds a BFA in Painting from Indiana University, Bloomington (1982) and an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts (2014).
