Gregory Lind Gallery is pleased to present, Step Sideways, Chris Corales’ third one-person exhibition with the gallery. The title comes from an eponymous song by The Fall. The line "Just step sideways from this future world today" suggests an invitation to deviate from a prescribed trajectory.

Chris Corales creates collages that incorporate vintage found material such as cardboard, old book- binding cloth, and the like. Step Sideways features constructivist abstractions resembling the imperfections of infrastructure and nature. Highways, roads and canyons become mere linear echoes of their actual reality. While based on no particular time or place, they are in effect, fragments of daily ephemeral experience.

As with Corales’ last body of work, Permanent Vacation, these collages continue to explore the psyche of displacement and migration, a recurring condition of our times. In Hermitage, a sparse composition reminiscent of a make-shift structure or of books on a shelf, the artist ruminates on self-sufficiency as well as introspection.

The three works in the Dirty Snow series are a quiet comedic response to opinions about snow in urban settings, professed by people of varying authority. Since his move from the West Coast in 2012, first to Philadelphia and next to Toronto, Corales has come to accept snow, dirty or otherwise.

The diptychs and triptychs series explore open and contained spaces as literal and imaginary landscapes. Compositionally, the groupings vary from precise to loose, from linear to curvilinear, and from ironed to textured. Employing a strategy of reflection and pattern repetition, these works evoke the imperfect ways in which memory functions - each recollection removing or adding details without ever achieving a full image of past experience.

Corales' work evokes the liminal spaces in which time touches and changes us, without allowing anything or anybody to remain unmarked. Elements of the collages reveal signs of their own temporality—and in turn, they become markers of Corales' artistic practice over time.

Chris Corales (b. 1969) has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in San Francisco at venues including Gregory Lind Gallery, Luggage Store Gallery, Adobe Books, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, and New Langton Arts. He has shown nationally with Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia, PA; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York, NY; Samson Projects, Boston, MA; and the International Collage Center, Milton, PA. His work has been featured in international exhibitions at Pierogi Gallery, Leipzig, Germany; and Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon, Portugal. Corales has been featured in Artforum, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Sun and NY Arts Magazine. Originally from the Bay Area, he currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

• Press release (PDF) | Artist bio (PDF)