NEW YORK, NY.- Olney Gleason will present Painting, Photography, Painting, an exhibition of new work by artists who use found photographs, film, and digital media as generative source material. Bringing together Thom Blair, Liza Jo Eilers, Tomas Harker, Julia Maiuri, Nolan Simon, Nana Wolke, and Leon Xu, the exhibition considers how contemporary photographic technologies continue to shape, and expand, the possibilities of painterly language.

The exhibition takes its title from an essay by Carol Armstrong, which posits that “mediums exist only in relation to one another, within a matrix, and as a means of communication rather than as purely (self-)reflexive entities.” [1] Stretched, distorted, or otherwise hyper-processed, the images in Painting, Photography, Painting derive their subject matter and compositional logic from imagery produced for other media. Their translation onto canvas reasserts the objecthood of painting, foregrounding surface, depth, and texture. In each case, the works insist on their material presence, positioning painting as an intermediary between the viewer and the screen.

While remaining faithful to the venerable lineage of painting, the works in the exhibition mirror the conventions through which images are now produced, consumed, and circulated across global platforms. As in the work of Liza Jo Eilers, dramatically wide and vertical formats nod to the computer monitor or smartphone. Others echo drone footage or surveillance technology, with the subject seen from above and the horizon slipping out of view. The work of Tomas Harker further destabilizes a sense of orientation, using close crops or the blurring of background elements as if viewed through the anamorphic lens, commonly used when filming in cinematic aspect ratios. Even monochrome, unnaturally colored, or saturated palettes recall the bright screen of digital media and the effects of photo editing tools.

Across the exhibition, various painterly approaches test the ways in which images can function once they have been unmoored from narrative sequence. In several paintings, the logic of montage becomes newly resonant. Employed in the work of Julia Maiuri, it loosens the subject from any stable sense of time and collapses “before” and “after” into a single, ambiguously layered frame. Nana Wolke’s process begins with the act of filming or sourcing found footage, which the artist then edits to create distinct visual atmospheres ready for translation into painting. The image’s location in the film is demarcated by the time stamp included in the work’s title.

Technologies of printing show themselves through the paintings’ surface construction and markmaking. Leon Xu’s use of an airbrush allows the removal of the artist’s hand. Echoing the technique of imprimatura – historically used to map out tonal values in the first layer of paint – both Xu and Nolan Simon employ dye sublimation prints as the base layer for their compositions. Thom Blair actively pushes mechanical means even further, using an inkjet printer in successive layers to build color while editing the surface with water and gesso between passes.

These painters’ subjects often arrive already shaped by the economies of scrolling, cropping, compression, and recirculation – systems that painting is able to slow down and re-materialize. Wolke’s mixture of sand into gesso when priming the canvas results in an emphasis on texture, replicating the grainy quality of low resolution video. Liza Jo Eiler uses thermally sensitive paint, so that the black squares censoring the painting underneath turn temporarily transparent after exposure to heat, slowing down visual processing to make palpable the work of relation.

Throughout, Painting, Photography, Painting meditates on the rapidly changing technological advances of image production, exploring what persists when photographic sources are filtered through the materially insistent processes of painting.


[1] Carol Armstrong, “Painting Photography Painting: Timelines and Medium Specificities,” in Painting Beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition, ed. Isabelle Graw and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 124.