Painting, Photography, Painting

Olney Gleason is pleased to 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, and Nana Wolke, 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 subjects and compositional logic from imagery produced for other media. Their translation onto canvas reasserts the objecthood of painting, foregrounding surface, depth, and texture; extreme horizontal and vertical formats nod to the widescreen monitor or smartphone, while blurred grounds mimic the camera lens’s field of focus. 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. Their 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. If the image is a byproduct of an economy built on reproduction, the exhibition explores what persists when photographic sources are filtered through the materially insistent processes of painting.

Within this condition, the logic of montage becomes newly resonant. As artist and writer Hito Steyerl describes, montage constitutes “the first step toward a liberation from cinematic linear perspective.” [2] When employed as a still image, it loosens the subject from any stable sense of time, collapsing before and after into a single, ambiguously layered frame. Several works in the exhibition draw on similarly composite or fragmented sources, using painterly processes to test how images function once unmoored from narrative sequence.

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[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.
[2] Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 27.