Radiator Gallery presents, From Life, a group show curated by Zoe Pettijohn Schade and Christopher Schade.

Contributing artists: Andras Borocz, Marc Connor, Alec Dartley, Anna Ehrsam, Douglas Goldberg, Nancy Goldring, Everest Hall, Colin Hunt, Joshua Mersh, Israel Martinez, Zoe Pettijohn Schade, Christopher Schade, Dan Sutherland

From the press release:

Making art directly from observation is one of the oldest of human impulses. The cave paintings from Chauvet, France documented in Werner Herzog’s 2010 film, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” were painted 30,000 years ago and are a testament to this fact. 

As a central feature in most art traditions, working from life is sometimes associated with a desire for a previous time. To the contrary, the most compelling aspect of working from observation is that by definition one is engaging in the immediate present. The observed subject shares the same space and time as the artist, and is governed by the same physical laws: light, gravity, time and the change inherent in the material world. These shared limits create a bond between the artist, subject and viewer.

An intrinsic aspect of focused observation is engaging with the limits of ones own subjectivity. The act of looking closely reveals the assumptions, distortions, and illusions that underlie perception. This fluid space between the mind that perceives and the external object is the focus of many of the artists work in the show.
This exploration of perception does not necessarily lead to realism. Instead, the work in the show is a testament to a range of interests and responses; some artists find hidden geometries that inform abstraction, while others mine the psychological, cultural and technological associations embedded in what they are witnessing. The relationship between artists and subjects also varies; several of the artists construct every aspect of their subject by creating elaborate models, while others immerse themselves in the immense scale of landscape. They are all in the here and now.