{ Ohne Titel }

No Future Projects is pleased to present “Ohne Titel” an exhibition of recent paintings made by Scott Grow.

“I am interested in the central issues of abstract painting and what abstract painting is and can be today. To rethink the boundaries of painting. Paintings that do not want to be pictures. To explore the blurred boundaries where painting becomes sculpture and sculpture becomes painting.

I am interested in the relationships of form, color, process and material, as they come to express concepts of presence and absence, intention and involvement. Through the arrangement of paintings and sculptures within a space, I wish to create an aesthetic experience in which people may take a moment to reflect on the purity of form and means.”

The Indianapolis based painter and curator, will exhibit three lush paintings produced this winter while in residency at Takt Kunstprojektraum in Berlin, Germany. Scott is the founder and lead writer of “On the Cusp”, a contemporary arts blog, an independent curator, and the recipient of the prestigious Creative Renewal Arts Fellowship Grant. Scott is currently working on curating a major exhibition on abstract works on paper at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art that opens this December.

“Ohne Titel” runs from April 1 – 30 . 2010

NFP is a temporary and moveable project space currently located in Dayton, Ohio.

NFP is by appointment only and for more information : cortland242 @ yahoo . com

{ Flowers in the Dustbin }

NO FUTURE presents “Flowers in the Dustbin : Timothy B. Buckwalter“

Magazine illustrations, cartoons and comic strips from the recent past are appropriated for Timothy Buckwalter’s paintings. Once removed from their original context, Buckwalter edits the images into new narratives and repaints them by hand on to kinetic fields of color. To further enhance the re-contextualizing of the image, titles for the finished paintings are chosen from modern literature. Tacks are applied to the edges of the canvas as a reference to the history of painting.

Buckwalter’s paintings — by blending together forgotten images and comic dialogues with fields of color to create contemporary tales of anxiety, desire, idiocy, anger, joy and fear — connect the dots to our past, those unreconciled moments that continue to hemorrhage into our present.

For the drawings, he slashes down or abbreviates text (usually lifted from comic strips and cartoon anthologies) into new phrases and inks them onto crisp white sheets of paper.

Often the finished statements are reflections of Buckwalter’s psyche at the time.

Originally from Pennsylvania, Timothy Buckwalter (born 1966) now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He graduated with honors from Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art in 1988.

Though he holds a bachelors degree in sculpture (having studied under Annie Sprinkle, Dennis Adams, and Steven Beyer), Buckwalter is known primarily as a painter.

His work has been included in the Linz Biennale and exhibited nationally at De/Chiara Stewart Gallery in New York; Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon; Rebecca Ibel Gallery in Columbus, Ohio; Pharmaka in Los Angeles; Lizabeth Olivera, Pro Arts, Oakland Art Gallery in Oakland; and Four Walls, Southern Exposure, The Luggage Store and Braunstein/Quay in San Francisco.

Buckwalter has also written extensively about fine art. In addition to his popular blog (where you are currently parked), he has penned features and reviews for San Francisco Chronicle, The East Bay Monthly and KQED.

Over the last five years, Buckwalter helped pioneer the curating of online exhibitions, including his own yearlong weekly drawing shows. Recently, he guest curated a show — based on Echo & The Bunnymen’s pop classic Killing Moon — for The Beholder. He has also guest curated Come Tomorrow: 25 Years of NIAD for Eyebeam’s Add-Art project and Feeling Yourself Disintegrate for SFMOMA’s OpenSpace.

{ angel dust }

No Future Projects present

Angel Dust : Matthew Langley + Douglas Witmer

www . matthewlangley . com (Brooklyn . NY)
www . douglaswitmer . com (Philadelphia . PA)
Jan 6 – Feb 1, 2010

( L ) Witmer : Untitled (Marigold) . Acrylic on canvas

( R ) Langley : Lovers By Rote . Acrylic on paper mounted on panel

Langley : On Developing New Images

The artworks come from a series of divergent strategies. One of building and extending – the other of reducing and minimizing. These disparate approaches are not a way to impose meanings on the work, but can be viewed as a metaphoric crossroads. This crossroads is about extending the relationship of these different approaches, while at the same time allowing the viewer the liberty of time for further reading of the work. The image making that comes from this strategic foundation will be clear, concise and rational, while at the same time allowing for a sense of community and/or contemplation to develop in and around the artworks.

The artworks are not linear narratives, this allows the element of time to be stretched or compressed to accommodate the viewer. This flexibility to time as well as environment allows the artwork to reveal itself in slower and calmer ways than an artwork that is based only on the relationship of drama and detail of the forms presented inside of it, while allowing those with a more compressed timeline to react to the base elements of the composition and painterliness of the overall approach.

This open ended approach is central to the artworks I create and allows them to be developed with a non-specific exactness.

Witmer : …Not A Statement

A painting is not a statement.  It is the evidence of painting.

Painting is a relationship.  The relationship is ongoing.  To paint is an act of devotion in the relationship.

I want to believe that in the relationship of painting the act of painting is its own reward.

I want to believe that the relationship of painting, when one devotes oneself to it, extends beyond the boundaries of a painting, however indefinite or unmeasureable this extension may seem to be.

I want to believe that the relationship of painting values inquiry over conclusion.

To attempt to be conclusive in painting is to attempt to make paintings that are, in effect, statements.

Attempting to make a statement with a painting undermines the idea that painting is a relationship.

These words are a statement and they are not painting.