FILE NOT FOUND
Work by BRIAN KANE and MARGARET PETTEE OLSEN
Curated by Alexander Castro
OCTOBER 15 2015 through NOVEMBER 14 2015
Opening Reception: OCTOBER 15, 2015, 5-10 pm
Gallery EOSS
91 Hartford Ave., Suite 105, Providence, RI
718.501.4155
https://www.facebook.com/galleryeoss/
Gallery EOSS welcomes BRIAN KANE and MARGARET PETTEE OLSEN for its November show, FILE NOT FOUND, an exciting combination of work that walks the line between digital and physical.
Pettee Olsen is an accomplished painter whose brushwork offers much to contemplate and absorb. Her large canvases are blatantly abstract but so rich in color, texture and gesture that one finds traces of the figurative. Her mark-making evokes image-editing software with graphic overlays, howling blank space, and chaotic trails of paint that weave sometimes fluidly, sometimes jarringly, through one another.
Kane, meanwhile, enjoys toying with the stuff of digital matter: he’s covered billboards in nature imagery, balloons with hashtags, and people’s eyes with black privacy bars. Both artists thus deal with artistic technologies. Pettee Olsen layers paint until it achieves a kind of controlled chaos, eventually approximating the feeling of what she calls a “media-driven version of experience.”
Kane has a different response to this data-driven life: his IRL Photoshop masks, OMG and hashtag balloons, and real-life Photoshop ‘cutouts’ seem to be attempts at materializing what has largely been a digital world. Both artists navigate a world drowning in formless data, but ultimately produce physical objects.
Data may appear at first invulnerable, intangible and out of harm’s reach, but it often depends on a physical host. In this intriguing show, Kane and Pettee Olsen search for new forms to host the wild hordes of zeroes and ones we encounter in our daily lives.
Alexander Castro
Alexander Castro (b. 1992) is a freelance journalist and arts writer living in Attleboro, Mass.