Unchained

Unchained by Robert Larson. Join us for the opening reception Saturday, August 17, from 7-11pm. The exhibit will be free and open to the public for viewing through September 7, 2013.

The past and present mingle on every street corner; the back alleys, empty lots, abandoned buildings and detritus provide a compelling unvarnished view of our unfolding history and the urban experience. The artistic process of Robert Larson’s work revolves around collecting the discarded materials that litter our terrain. While the work is full of big ideas, its essential physicality—like digging ditches—keeps it honest.

From the artist:

I glean pigment from the urban landscape in search of color and texture—artifacts rich in time, history and experience. The resulting accumulation of post-consumer packaging records myriad human activities—a telling mix of pleasures, habits and addictions, including my own obsessive scavenging and appropriating. The intimate stories these empty cigarette packages, matchbooks, disposable lighters, lottery tickets, gum wrappers and drug-baggies tell, are encrypted, just as the personal identities of those that touched them remain anonymous.

My work, while full of topical documentary evidence, explores the power of transformation—physically and perceptually. The once identical and uniform surfaces of the machine-made items themselves are changing. Like old signs and walls with their distressed peeling paint, the discarded objects fade and abrade with exposure to the elements. At their most weathered, the discarded items are decomposing, literally returning to earth and becoming more of nature than of man.

From this collision of manmade materials and the forces of nature, a dynamic palette of weathered hues, tones and textures is inadvertently created. The relative chaos of chance and happenstance that begins the physical transformation is countered by the systematic order of processing in the studio. Items are sorted, graded and dissected into facets of graphic and tonal visual information. These collections of highly processed “dry pigments” are then organized into gridded compositions that share a kinship with the reductive aesthetic of patterned minimalist abstraction. They also represent a return to the tidy, orderly arrangement of store-shelf offerings and the austere rigor of factory-made origins.

The transmutation of universally recognizable product packaging, into a non-objective abstraction, is to move from a specific pop cultural reference point towards a more open space of associative meaning. A space I feel is well suited to examine the discarded items’ complex, multi-layered histories and the inextricably intertwined roles they play in our society—contributing to and defining our culture.

The show’s title “Unchained” refers to the newfound freedom the discarded materials find in art. Perhaps ultimate liberation is achieved when, divorced from ideas, the discarded materials transcend their past lives and function purely as optical information. It is then, in defiance of generally held assumptions and beliefs, that their innate beauty can be appreciated—freeing us to experience them, and hopefully the world around us, in new and exciting ways.