Here from There
HERE FROM THERE
Greenleaf Gallery, Whittier College, Los Angeles
September 4 - October 12, 2018
Steve Budington makes paintings, drawings, and other work to engage a sense of mental wilderness and direct experience in the midst of intense cultural mediation. The artist uses maps, anatomical diagrams, and other systems of representation much in the way artists of the past used nature or still lives as models or starting off points. “I’m interested in creating opportunities for improvising larger meanings from the cultural fragments and limited points of view that often comprise a relationship to the world. I recognize some kind of absurd, even utopian desire to see or create a “big picture” in things, to make sense of it all and have clarity and perspective and order, while at the same time I deeply distrust grand narratives and overarching worldviews that so often stifle the here and now of lived experiences.”
For his exhibition at the Greenleaf Gallery, Budington presents three shaped paintings built of triangular canvases, themselves extruded from the shape of Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxion air ocean world map; a selection of works on paper that respond to 19th century anatomical diagrams and more contemporary forms of imaging; and an archive of found image works collected in plastic document sleeves. The works together form a field of associations, impressions, and physicalities that consider how the visible world is constructed and received, mapped, and communicated.