FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Jake Longstreth: "All it is" - New Paintings
December 12 - January 31, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 13, 2-5 PM
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:30-5:30 PM
Email: info@gregorylindgallery
Gregory Lind Gallery is pleased to present All it is, new paintings by Oakland-based artist Jake Longstreth. The images in this exhibition, through their often elevated, distant perspectives, invite a regard for the scenic. They interrogate the expansive space of a largely exurban landscape - exploring both the industrial and the pastoral; revealing their blurred dialogue. While natural forms are frequently relegated to distant backdrops, accommodating a foreground of human enterprise, it is the totality of the two that equate the image.
In "Crematory," the suggestion of death in the painting�s title is subsumed by the blandness of the depicted environment - a checkerboard-patterned expanse of lawn is bordered by a neatly paved driveway - beyond it, layers of blue hills fade into the sky. The title and location are not a casual juxtaposition, and the calm orderliness of the piece creates conceptual discord with the title. Similarly, "Appalachia" offers a lush backdrop of foliage and hills bisected by an enormous swimming pool. The painting plays with our notions of this remote region, whose beauty proves resilient to oversized human ambition.
Longstreth reduces his images to their basic elements. His flat, light-filled paintings stray liberally from the photographs they are based on, inhabiting a middle ground of painterly subjectivity. Faithful adherence to the observed world is not Longstreth�s goal, as he explains: "Painting can be useful in that it simplifies, revealing the abstractions of our current condition through a discerning lack of detail." Indeed, his pictures omit as much information as they provide, while still corresponding to the weight of experience. Such expressive limitations show evidence of the restraint in Longstreth�s vision: his work resists itself, stubbornly showing what is - all it is - in an abiding quietude.
Jake Longstreth received his MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco. His recent exhibitions include Group Show, EgoPark Gallery, Oakland, CA, 2008; "Real" Space, Mahan Gallery, Columbus, OH, 2007; and Wabi Ranch, Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco. A recipient of the 2008 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a 2007 Artist in Residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska City, NE, Longstreth has been featured in Art in America, Art Forum, and the San Francisco Chronicle. This is Jake Longstreth�s second solo show with Gregory Lind Gallery.