Gregory Lind Gallery is pleased to present Redivider, an exhibition of works on cutout paper by New York based artist Jim Gaylord. This is his fourth one-person show with the gallery.

At face value, the title Redivider is a palindrome and evokes the symmetry within much of the work. Moreover, it references the methodology behind this series, where compositions from earlier paintings were deconstructed and then reconfigured into new ones. Sometimes this was achieved by rearranging the imagery through drawings or digital composites. In other cases, actual works on paper were physically sliced up and pieced back together in a different way. To redivide, or divide again, becomes this act of revisiting past ideas by breaking them down and starting again.

Drawing upon his previous work as source material, Gaylord considers the relationship between abstraction, visual reference and process. Whereas his past paintings and works on paper are based on film stills, the current work draws upon intuition to advance a personal visual vocabulary. The most essential ideas rise to the surface and are explored through purely formal means, released from external associations. Throughout the process, the medium of collage allows for spontaneity and play, until the point when everything is fixed into place.

The “Quarter Studies” series expands on this process, where roughly one quarter of a larger composition is isolated to create a smaller one. Through these quieter works, Gaylord extracts and meditates on motifs lifted from their dense surroundings. In turn, some of these studies later became the provenience for the larger works in the exhibition, providing the germ for the imagery to expand from.

The unpainted works on white paper developed as a method of distilling the imagery even further, reducing it to its most basic elements of line and shape. They become a way of understanding the structure and physicality of their painted counterparts, relying on light and shadow to define their form.

Jim Gaylord received his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in Film from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the West Collection, the Aspen Collection and the Progressive Art Collection. He has completed residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Gaylord lives and works in Brooklyn.

• Press release (PDF) | Artist bio (PDF)
• Review: Art Ltd.