CHRIS RIDDLE

Afterimage

Kieran Timberlake

20 July - 4 October 2023

Curated by Charlotte G. Chin Greene

“To think the you are separate from the notion that there are distinct things and distinct events in the world is a calculus, it is like pretending a curve is a set of distinct points”. -Alan Watts

This exhibition represents a survey of the last 5 years of my practice. In winter 2018, I found myself living near a lake in snowy Upstate New York, making paintings in a col, dark basement. The work begun in that space represented the seeds of ideas I have slowly tended to over this period of time.

The earliest piece in this exhibition,’Study for a Painting (Envelope)’ (2018) was just the beginning of this rabbit trail. Initially, my curiosity began with formal investigations, as ‘Study’ demonstrates. It’s a painting of an object, scaled up, rendered from a photograph. But over time, ‘Study’ began to shift how I thought of myself as an artist. I moved away from seeing myself not only an abstract painter who occasionally makes a photorealist painting (which is what I am still doing), but something closer to a conceptual artist who makes mostly painted objects. As I changed how I saw myself, this piece changed in my mind too I began to see it not only as a representational painting, but instead I saw it as a part of a process, as a prop, to something beyond images. Its mimetic quality began to perform as more than a device for carrying messages, but as a mechanism for a way of seeing.

Along with the envelope painting are two 4-part groupings of painted drop ceiling tiles mounted on wooden shelves. Completed in 2020, the ceiling tiles are a material most commonly used to hide the inner workings of a residence or institution through an aesthetic of compartmentalization. The use of these objects furthered a preoccupation into spatial content-mainly borders, walls, and facades. Purpose built to hide the unseemly, I was fascinated by the idea of that which hides in plain sight. This idea of camouflage as a way beyond form and into resistance and liberation. A facade of disruption to the eye which patterns its survival on what is already seen.

Over this period of years, I have developed a practice preoccupied with 4 sequential attributes: presence, absence, gesture, and rupture. The largest portion of work in this show is the most recent. Represented here are two paintings, ‘The Shimmering’ and ‘Study for a Painting (Thicket)’, both from 2023. In conversation with these painted works are a set of 7 ink and charcoal drawings from 2022-23. These 9 works chosen for this exhibition feel as if the operate on the margins of the sequential attributes listed above, as if their subject refuses the supposed binary between representation and abstraction. This refusal blurs the distinction between what is seen and what is hidden, offering a space for liberation, after images.

Chris Riddle

Philadelphia, July 2023

Hedge

Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art and Architecture

February 5-8, 2020

‘Hedge’ is a series of painted drop-ceiling tiles, in diptychs or four part groupings, displayed on shelves. Derived from Old English, hedge original pertained to a line of closely spaced shrubs or trees, planted and trained to form a barrier that marks the boundary of an area. The definition has now expanded beyond the original meaning.

In linguistics, a hedge allows a speaker to dodge or evade, intentionally obscuring meaning and intent. ‘Hedge’ uses broad methods of production to question the traditional notion of an artist’s style. Black and white ‘dazzle dazzle’ patterns mimicking WW1 warship camouflage co-act with tiles painted in a photorealist manner of images pulled from French sociologist Roger Callois’ essay ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, in which acts of biological mimicry, camouflage, and reproduction occur.

To hedge a bet is to avoid the risk of commitment, to protect oneself from loss by performing counterbalancing actions. Within ‘Hedge’, no single point of view, visual solution or technical style is consistently utilized. The diversified making (photorealist and process-based painting, found object alteration, minimalist approaches, expressive abstraction, et al.) pose new possibilities for what can coexist and be in dialogue, examining the perceived limits of visual an conceptual systems, questioning prescribed notions of meaning. The distinction is blurred between what is seen and what is hidden.