Plastic Alphabet

September 9 to September 30, 2021

Artist Talk: September 16, 5 pm 

Reception: September 16, 6-7:30 pm

Shane Walsh considers painting a form of collage. He playfully dissects then reconstructs visual languages to arrive at a form of abstract painting that is both autobiographical and historically aware.

His omnivorous appetite for visual culture results in a wide array of references, quotations, techniques and materials that ultimately merge into Frankenstein-like compositions that are fused but never seamless.

This “painting as collage” mindset grew from his experience as a DJ during the 1990’s and is a direct result of his involvement in the subcultures of the era. Other influences like photocopied zines, television motion graphics, MTV, NBA expansion team designs, Garbage Pail Kids, Modernist Abstraction and many more haunt his painting practice.

He then redirects and choreographs this ensemble on the painting’s surface employing a variety of paint handling techniques and charged interactions. The transformed “whole” of these painterly elements destabilizes their component languages, and ultimately creates the grammar for a new one. For Walsh, simply restating the terms of formal abstract painting is not a sufficient exercise in 2021, but by remixing and reshaping existing visual codes, he creates a customized, reinvented, individualized dialect of abstraction that is specific to his life experiences, relevant to his time and place.