Borderland Abstraction includes several generations of artists working throughout the United States who are invested in the expanded possibilities and problems of abstraction. Their work, in painting, sculpture, photography and video, often attaches to other disciplines - music, architecture, film, urbanism, virtual space - with a fervor that swells the limits of abstraction.
Artists: Tim Bavington, Nate Boyce, Michelle Grabner, Amy Granat, Mary Heilmann, Matthew Kluber, Takeshi Murata, Ara Peterson, Eli Ping, Eric Sall, Colin C. Smith and Wendy White.
Debate on abstraction ballooned in the last decade, engulfing issues as varied as the politics of beauty, material ingenuity, site-specificity and fragmentation. Response to these issues splintered into strongly worded arguments on the cause of visual pleasure v. market pressure; iteration v. spontaneity, the offhand gesture v. formal purity; reductivist aesthetics v. maximalist expression; and on and on. Rather than wallow in these debates, which ultimately shift focus from the work and its ideas, this exhibition explores the vibrant cracks in between, places where there are authentic pleasures in the making, looking and thinking about contemporary abstraction.