Oct, 2016
Views Through Windows
"Views Through Windows"
Artist Statement:
O'Donnell's painting practice is primarily concerned with a distinct feeling of disconnect with a time and a place. His work is concerned with paradoxical instances in which a place can be both very significant to a person yet at the same time remain aloof and uncannily distant. These places are fringes, aberrations.
"Views Through Windows" reveals some of the domestic tones to O'Donnell's work. The instances of disconnect here occur in particular when you look through windows, either from the outside in or the inside out. There's a double screening effect, when you look through a window and make a painting about the experience. This doubling is intensified due to the paintings being exhibited within window spaces.
These experiences of place lost and place gained are further disrupted by memory or nostalgia, by fleeting moments of beauty and by strange objects and occurrences, such as the habit of placing cat scratch climbers in bay windows, an odd motif found in some of the artist's paintings.
To understand these banal miracles in paint is to understand them better and at the same time to become more confused by them. Abstraction, surface, medium, framing, these languages common to painting are both a help and a hindrance, obscuring yet making clearer things clearer, like looking through a murky window.
Bio:
Samuel O'Donnell was born in Bolton in 1992. He received a First Class BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking from the Glasgow School of Art in 2015. He is currently living and working in Glasgow.
ARTIST’S TALK:
Sunday 6 November 2016, 4.00pm – 5.30pm at Generator Projects, 25/26 Mid Wynd Industrial Estate, Dundee, DD1 4JG.
Artist Website
№ 33/99
№ 1/1
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