Please join us at the opening, Saturday September 12 6-9pm for recent work by Anthony Cudahy and Nick Van Zanten
The Exhibition runs September 12-October 4
Gallery hours Saturday and Sunday 12-5pm
Or by appointment contact dawnhuntergallery@gmail.com
Dawn Hunter Gallery
200 6th Street
Brooklyn, New York 11215
A figure echoed and “twin”ned proliferates across a landscape. Images persist, transform, and assert themselves in Anthony Cudahy‘s recent paintings. The Expulsion. Snyder’s dogs on the hunt. A photograph discarded, some record of a camping trip, found blown down Underhill and Bergen. Several moments from a wedding on a hill in California, captured on film in the ’70s. Histories personal and universal are leveled by the surface and the paint. There’s a feeling of perpetuity or at least of time-extending in these paintings, but that’s only one of many lies the medium is built upon.
Oriented strand board, or OSB, is a common building material made by randomly pressing wood scraps together to form panels. Visually, OSB is tacky; it is exuberant and boring; its form is both organic and artificial. It is ubiquitous and utterly banal. In his OSB paintings, Nick Van Zanten emphasizes all these qualities and their oppositions. Many of his paintings look almost exactly like the material on which they are painted, but this is achieved only through painstakingly repainting, in oil, the image of the panel over itself. His goal is to transform, through intense labor and consideration, a dull visual symbol of the cheap and careless environment that we have made for ourselves into a beautiful art object, without changing its appearance. Van Zanten’s work aims to create opposition between appearance and reality and to complicate the relationship between form and content, deriving formal elements from the materials that refer, in unexpected and ironic ways, to formalist abstraction.