EXHIBITION IMAGES | WORKS | PRESS RELEASE | ARTIST PAGE
August 30 – September 22, 2014
For Colby Bird’s second exhibition with the gallery, he is showing 5 new works on paper, and 5 new supports–structures that rely on wood and fruit to balance the artworks placed on top. Set Down is a meditation on the role of labor and reward in the pursuit of an art career, and examines the interplay and mediation of these actions with both pleasure-seeking and guilt.
The prints are hand-toned photographic works on paper that are made sculptural with the addition of custom made, professionally painted frames. The 9 colors of these frames are based on the colors in the Kodak Color Control Patch, a guide used by professional photographers to obtain accurate color when re-photographing artwork. These colors are defined, non-objective elements that represent logic and labor, while the subject matter of the photographs present rest, leisure, and abstraction. To create these prints, Bird has utilized the normally discarded negative portion of pull-apart instant film, which has been scanned, output as Photostatic prints, and repeatedly saturated with wood stain. The supports are intensely-worked wood objects: sawed, sanded, stained, constructed, then re-sanded, re-stained, and re-constructed until their appearance becomes an elemental representation of the original object. A support in its most basic form.
Colby Bird (born 1978; Austin, Texas) received his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. He has had a solo exhibition at University Galleries at Texas State University, and also recently exhibited at Aspen Art Museum, Arthouse, Austin, and Hagedorn Foundation, Atlanta. His work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Bird currently lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. The artist is also represented by Fitzroy in New York, NY and Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin, TX.