Max Presneill - Anarchy and Other Things to Think About

MAX PRESNEILL ANARCHY AND OTHER THINGS TO THINK ABOUT

MAX PRESNEILL A N A R C H Y A N D OT H E R T H I N G S TO T H I N K A B O U T University Art Gallery Department of Art School of the Arts California State University Stanislaus

375 copies printed Max Presneill: Anarchy and Other Things to Think About August 21 - October 10, 2014 University Art Gallery School of the Arts California State University Stanislaus One University Circle Turlock, CA 95382

This exhibition and catalog have been funded by: Associated Students Instructionally Related Activities, California State University Stanislaus

Copyright © 2014 California State University Stanislaus All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher.

Catalog Design: Nic Webber, School of the Arts, California State University Stanislaus Catalog Printing: Claremont Print, Claremont, CA Catalog Photography: Courtesy of the artist.

ISBN: 978-1-940753-05-8

Cover Image: Choices for the Chidless, 2014, oil and enamel on canvas, 72” x 68”

CON T E NT S Director’s Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Grant Vetter: Paint Like an Egyptian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Résumé. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Artist Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

D IRE C TO R ’S FO R E WORD Max Presneill – Anarchy and Other Things to Think About, represents a chance to view the extraordinary work of Max Presneill. He has extensive experience as an internationally known artist with exhibited works in many presitigous exhibitions.

In addition to his work as an Artist, Presneill is also the Director and Curator of the Torrance Art Museum and the Curatorial Director for Artra Curatorial. He founded and was the former Director of Raid Projects and was Director of the Mark Moore Gallery. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions for museums, institutes and galleries in London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Mexico City, Sydney, Istanbul, Paris and the United States. These exhibitions have had monumental results for the talented artists that he has included in his exhibitions.

Anarchy and Other Things to Think About has been a long time coming for me. I have been watching and enjoying Max’s work develop and mature for the better part of a decade. I am very excited to be able to exhibit his work for others to enjoy.

I would like to thank the many colleagues that have been instrumental in presenting this exhibition. Max Presneill for the opportunity of exhibiting his brilliant work, Grant Vetter for the insightful essay, the College of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, California State University, Stanislaus for the catalog design and Claremont Print and Copy for the printing of this catalog.

Many thanks are also extended to the Instructionally Related Activities Program of California State University, Stanislaus, as well as anonymous donors for the funding of the exhibition and catalogue. Their support is greatly appreciated.

Dean De Cocker, Director University Art Gallery California State University, Stanislaus

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INTRODUCTION

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GRANT VETTER: PAINT LIKE AN EGYPTIAN

“ ...the symbolic work of art is always more or less limitless.”

Hegel From Lectures on Fine Art (c) Egyptian Temples “Hegel is also the thinker of irreducible difference. He rehabilitated thought as the memory productive of signs.”

Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology: Part I: Writing before the Letter “All the old paintings on the tomb, They do the sand dance, don’cha know?

If they move too quick (Oh-Wayo-Oh) They’re falling down like a domino.”

The Bangles ‘Walk like an Egyptian’ “The present state of art cannot therefore be defined as neo-eclectic or as neo-romantic. What is happening is a much more radical and decisive shift, which I would define as ‘the Egyptian effect’. The tendency to collapse the ancient and the new into a single temporal dimension, arranging them alongside one another and leaving the resulting contradiction wide open, was indeed typical of Egyptian civilization. Hence the impression of enigmatic synchronicity, and almost of a completion of time, that ancient Egyptian art inspires.1” Mario Perniola Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art Excavation.

Max Presneill makes art like an Egyptian, or rather, his works are those of a certain type which promotes an Egyptian effect. But what do we mean when we say Egyptian effect? Is it that his works have the status of being hieroglyphs — existing somewhere between the abstraction of linguistic characters and the rendering techniques of representational art? Or, is it that his paintings fall out of a properly ‘readable’ context by attempting to sign the thing-itself in an era obsessed with the discursive aspects of art? Or, is it that his paintings bring together a number of visual tropes that operate like a kind of impersonal iconography — or the allegorical language of western culture writ large — or sometimes, written quite small?

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Could it even be that Presneill’s pictures function like pictograms inasmuch as they rely on myth and narrative, everywhere colliding the symbols of modernity with their pre-modern and postmodern counterparts? Or, is it that his paintings present us with a field of graphic representations rather than reflections; that they treat style as a type of codex rather than a condition of expressivity; or that they everywhere evoke symbols of a double nature?

And is what we call the Egyptian effect really just a way of underscoring the gap between a thing and the formal language that enables its representation — the invention of a space measured by degrees rather than dichotomies? And does the dance of signification in Presneill’s work issue from the multiplication of ‘characters’ that operate like figures in the twofold sense of the word, i.e., as partial objects?

En(crypt)ians.

While all of the above certainly play an important role in understanding how the Egyptian effect is at work in Presneill’s art practice, it is probably best expressed by his activity as a scribe of sorts — everywhere juxtaposing one idiom against another, one figure against another, one way of making against another — add infinitum. In this regard, a trace of every modern pictorial language is at play in his oeuvre: Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Symbolism, Surrealism, Abstraction, etc. However, what is important about their appearance in Presneill’s imagery is not that he adheres to the ethos behind any of these movements or ‘schools’, but that he selectively transforms their motifs into a hieroglyphic language of sorts. Invested in creating a space between semblance and resemblance, Presneill’s unique form of modernist Egyptification revolves around the notion of art as ideogram, grapheme or even a certain morphological function. But we would be wrong to see his work as engaged in addressing a single period of artistic production, or enacting a single operation for that matter.

Afterall, the motif ’s that appear in Presneill’s paintings reach far beyond dictatorial forms of modernism. Glimpses of Baroque chiaroscuro, Trans-Avant-Garde graffiti, Mannerist distortions, Neo-expressionist cartoons, Gothic line work and Simulationist affects also play a prominent role in Presneill’s recombinant compositions. His is a picture of history in motion, played out through so many still frames, where each cut from the reel is presented as a discrete pictorial event in itself. And yet, because the motifs he selects have been so thoroughly deterritorialized — chronologically and synchronically — they appear as things to be deciphered, or as images that stand at a double remove from what they signify. Another way of saying the same thing is that all of these stylistic inflections never come to the surface in total. Instead, they only appear in Presneill’s work in order to remain submerged, retreating into the construction of a secret language that is as much about the antimonies of the contemporary moment as the ciphers that make interpretation possible.

But here again, we must be a bit more concise in order to capture how the Egyptian effect is a central dispositif of Presneill’s art practice. While he is certainly an adept scribe it is not because he can imitate different pictorial languages; and it is not because he plays with signs in a self-reflexive manner; and it is also not because he works with complex and sometimes monumental themes. All of this is readily apparent.

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Rather, Presneill’s work takes on an Egyptian register because it is comprised of an endless array of pictograms that are only readable from the end of history — or from a time that appears closed-in on itself through so many defunct teleologies, lost dynasties and errant systems of belief.The shear duplicity of mixed motifs in any one of Presneill’s public exhibitions exceeds the ethos of exclusivity associated with all the little fiefdoms of modernism and postmodernism, where each school holds a position of prominence until such a time as their forcible abdication. Running counter to this turn-style logic, Presneill’s art practice should be understood from a perspective that is eternal. But this is not an eternal that exists outside of space and time, but rather, a form of dwelling in the eternal present through the exacting work of cultural cryptology.

Taxonomy.

This is perhaps best exemplified by what Presneill refers to as the use of an ‘indicated aesthetic’, where painting operates more like a system of notations than a series of long-form expositions. Such an outlook is made manifest not only by the fact that Presneill’s work is composed from an expansive glossary of visual languages, but also through the many ways in which his pictures highlight the enigmatic nature of all signification vis-à-vis discrete juxtapositions, dramatic transpositions, and jarring forms of bricollage. Using an array of sampled styles and oblique allusions, Presneill’s projects act like a form of lucid dreaming — capturing impressions from a world caught in endless forms of transit.2 And yet, this form of hybrid pictorialism also offers us the opportunity for recognizing that all translation is interpretation, that every inscription draws its content from its context, and that behind every glyph resides a thing that resists being pictured.

As such, the particular problem that belies the Egyptian effect, and Presneill’s work in particular, is not just the wild proliferation of pictorial systems that can be used to indicate objects, but a total absence of any qualitative system of value that might allow one way of working to be privileged over another. The renowned philosopher of aesthetics, Mario Perniola describes this ‘Egyptian turn’ in cultural production in the following way: The Egyptian effect is not the consequence of any lack of newness, nor does it result from the realization of what was announced in the past. It is related to the impression that nothing is any longer allowed to take exclusive possession of time, or to establish with present time a relationship of mutual belonging. Time is completed because it no longer has either a clearly defined artistic will or a formal identity from which it cannot be separated. Completed time relativizes the entire artistic universe, transforming actuality into chance event and repertory into inventory.3 But one should note that Perniola is not saying that such an endeavor has anything to do with ‘cultural relativism’ or a lack of meaning. Instead, the Egyptian effect has to do with a pile up of meaning; of everything being all-too-meaningful; of every meaning being absolutely about its place within a system of signifiers rather than absolute embodiment, pure presence, or an internal logic. At best, the Egyptian turn might be described as a defacto transcendental condition, such that its crisis of conjecture is also its condition of possibility. At worst, it is an attempt to preserve fixed meanings over and against the electronic tower of Babel — or the cross-cultural effects of globalization and new media.

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Embracing the deconstructive impulse, Presneill’s work establishes a path that inverts these two tendencies by striving to preserve a panoply of artistic idioms while still lightening the ballast with regard to how they function as a system of signs. While his objects share a resonance with the art of ages past, their very contemporaniety depends on engaging with a form of history that is properly out of time — or of a kind of time out of joint — and perhaps even, a time that is itself, after time. This conflicted status shows itself not only in Presneill’s use of a provisional aesthetic but also in the fact that his characters almost always sit on a ground rather than in a space; that they gather together a minimum of means in order to produce a maximal effect; and that the specificity of their arrangement is what allows for their readability. From such a position, Presneill’s work can be seen as an encyclopedic approach to art making that permits any motif to appear in bas-relief — or as a sustained engagement with the post-historical condition and all that it permits.

But this is not to say that the collapse of postmodernism is something Presneill celebrates uncritically. Rather, his pictures reveal a great deal of trepidation about the contemporary state of culture. But here we should also stop to ask, where and how does this show itself in his production? What are the themes that Presneill’s work seeks to problematize? And how do we place an art, which is itself, about trying to articulate an implacable condition?

Lost World(s).

If we consider that our globalized world is best characterized by the continued acceleration of time, of things passing in and out of existence too fast, and of a certain feeling of saturated subjectivity, then Presneill’s pictures appear to be a crucial effort to deal with the problem of (dis)orientation. In an age where trends having been replaced by what is ‘trending’, where interactions have been superseded by transactions, and where all activity is now interactivity, multi-tasking, etc., it can begin to feel as if the whole of existence has begun to take on a verb tense attributable to the endless valorization of epiphenomena. In short, we are becoming a culture of hieroglyphic techniques, from text messaging and viral videos to hyperlinks and sound-bite entertainment.

Culture is now a whirling dervish of imagistic production unlike anything the world has ever known — and it is in this regard that ‘repertory’ has become ‘inventory’; that simulation has lead to cultural fragmentation; and that our grasp of totality has been obscured by the endless play of (glo)banality.

If we take this as the background that Presneill’s works are inscribed upon, then we can begin to understand how his images, installations and tombs of cultural artifacts attempt to stay, and even resist, the fluid nature of the moving image. By holding these pictograms still for a moment, and transposing them into a new medium or mediums, Presneill’s artistic production subjects the tumultuous flow of data-consciousness to the eternal perspective of a historical continuum subtracted from any cultural idiom in particular.

But much like Egyptian sarcophagi, Presneill also introduces some personal effects into the mix which are meant to upend the parodic aspects of postmodernism by extracting the authentic from the iconographic. In other words, his way of arranging motifs is as personal as it is ceremonial — or rather, it is a ceremony that attempts to wrest a sense of the autobiographical from

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the flux of meaning attributed to the signifiers from which it is composed. By attempting to work self-reflexivity backwards, Presneill images imbue cultural art-i-facts with a trace element of meaning that is typically absent. Freely appropriating every type of cultural meme through an active process of subjective detournment is Presneill’s way of providing a countersignature to the manufactured ‘sign’ value of the image. In this way, the entombment effect of spectacularized subjectivity isn’t revealed to be a personage wholly covered over, but one that is only partially wrapped in the image-texts of mass culture, preserved by the ubiquitous values of the consumer age, and above all else, by a certain drive toward agelessness.

As such, we can say that Presneill’s oeuvre is something like an attempt to grasp the present through the pre-sent, or that it is a reaction formation to the naturalization of remediated existence. At every turn in his work we see an endless negotiation with the invariable lightness of cultural signs and their infinite mutability; a concerted effort to channel the persistence of symbols and myths in a culture of unending recyclability; and a dedicated practice of reading history from the moment in which it takes shape.

But in order to get a little closer to the Egyptian aspect of Presneill’s paintings, it is better to look at the different trajectories his work has taken over the last decade or more, remembering all the while that the systemicity of Egyptian art is defined as much by its procedural presuppositions as the anonymity of its characters — two elements that are central to Presneill’s art practice.

Tomb Raiders.

Although it may surprise those new to his work, Presneill’s early paintings were largely abstract in nature. They were typically the outcome of a system of marking the canvas that always started with making a gesture, and then rotating the canvas ninety degrees, repeating the same action and so on, until the picture was finished. This continued until the canvas was entirely full, sometimes quite layered, sometimes less so. Existing somewhere between the early works of David Reed and the sensibility of Sean Scully, these process-based series tended to focus almost exclusively on the act of inscription, the effects it engendered, and the notion of engaging with the mark as a kind of personal artifact. This initial approach to painting, which married sign and geometry through the rigors of deliberate execution, can be considered wholly (neo)Egyptian in both its means and measure.

Over time however, Presneill began applying this same approach to figurative motifs and pop imagery — forcing found images into fixed orientations and structural organizations. This claustrophobic method of filling up the picture plane with different types of characters, was perhaps, Presneill’s second great Egyptian operation. During this period myth and symbolism began to creep back into Presneill’s work as well. Caught up in an explosion of new themes, this second shift welcomed the Golden Calf, the Jabberwocky, and the Minotaur in what can only be described as an allegorical parade of fractured fictions.

By contrast, Presneill’s third act of Egyptification, and the turn which best defines his work today, is the result of having introduced a greater degree of play between the personal and the impersonal, process and improvisation, editing and intractability.

In short, he has been developing a more occasional art — or a process that is much more dependent on engaging with images that resonate with the time of their production. Not only that, but Presneill sometimes makes use of a type of recursive gesture that keeps his work open to ongoing revisions and even last minute interventions — many of which take place right before the moment of an exhibition.

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With this recent change of direction, the sense of systemicity that dominated his previous works wasn’t at all lost. In fact, it was incorporated to an even greater degree by becoming subordinate to the motif. This new outlook ultimately allowed Presneill’s pictographic aesthetic to become a time-based and site specific practice, where the issue of display is an ongoing negotiation between space, sign and time. In retrospect, these three transformations in Presneill’s artistic production involved a journey from the architecture of inscription to the semantics of situatedness — or a move from the conscription of signs to the transcrypt-ions of the scribe.

From this new point of departure, the occasion of production can be considered a rather exceptional state, and for the scribe, even an ecstatic one. As Perniola has noted, it is not that “of the improviser who in different situations always adopts the same scheme and the same formulas”, but rather, “the moment in which the artist realizes that he is not at all the master of his own language. Occasion does not imply interchangeability and indistinction of situations, ‘adapting equally well to all times,’ but rather grasping the unrepeatable uniqueness of time.”4 Certainly, this is the type of occasion which Presneill seeks in his work, one which relishes in the riddles of pictorial language, admitting the unmasterability of all pictography, but striving for an articulation which holds its promise nonetheless. In other words, the occasion is here marked by the paradox of a scribe without master or a manifestation without manifesto. As such, Presneill’s imagery is not only composed of sampled languages, handed down through the ages, but rather, the becoming-other of dictation, inscription, expression or program vis-à-vis, their mutual interpenetration.

Dance Mummy... Dance!

Out of all of the aforementioned changes, it is important to recognize that this last transformation in Presneill’s modus operandi is, by far, the most radical. First, because autobiographical references have been incorporated into the work, and second, because there is a consistent effort placed on coordinating them within a complex cartography of images that threaten to erase any sense of groundedness.To put it in deconstructive terms, his pictures play with the doublebind of stasis/becoming, intentionality/ ephemerality, and automatism/selectivity. As such, an occasional art will always have a varied ontology — and in Presneill’s work we might call it a vari-ontology — that operates through a principle of irreducibility. Mario Perniola has described this new outlook with regard to the Egyptian effect in the following way: If the notion of occasion introduces a static, synchronic element into the experience of the present, the notion of inventory introduced a dynamic, diachronic element into the possession of the past. If the occasion severs the relation between present time and form, showing that a different way of ordering materials can shatter traditional unities (my emphasis). In this case too an Egyptian effect is produced...5 Much like Freud’s description of the dream-work, we might even say that the valorization of an occassionist perspective makes Presneill’s image-work into an allegory about the severed relation between time and (proper) form.

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In much the same way that the Egyptian’s viewed art as a “vast combinatory system in which high and low, male and female, light and dark, life and death, organic and inorganic never cease(d) to trade place(s) and to merge”, so too do Presneill’s compositions welcome the same principle of open access and internal conflict.6 In the last decade alone we can find appearances by characters as different as the Sphinx and Madonna, the Raven and Rasputin, Cleopatra and Medusa, Dinosaurs and Darwin, Turok and Billy the Kid,Valkerie’s and Prometheus, and even Winston Churchill and Captain Kirk! It is this phenomena of retuning doubles and duplicitous source material that allows us to see how Presneill’s art is circumscribed by the themes of resurrection and reanimation. As such, his pictures can be thought of as a virtual platform that mirrors the recent return of Tupac Shakur to the concert stage as a ‘living’ hologram.This polyvalent use of doppelganger forms allows for any figure or theme to be conjured up as the occasional subject of an eternally performative afterlife — creating the uncanny mummy dance of an underworld that only exists to entertain the over-world. In so many ways, the Egyptian effect is this opening of tombs that mixes the (post-) modern with the ancient, the living with the dead, and the hollowed with the spectacular.

Hieroglyphics and Hollography.

As such, the enigmatic quality of the hologram is not only a key to understanding how Presneill’s works function, but the emerging art of hollography also allows us to take stock of the ontological status of his project. Afterall, it is important to note that in Presneill’s art practice all of the past becomes mixed up with the present — skate culture, baby pictures, marathon runners, historical figures, ancient lands, myths from centuries past — all co-exist in various states of dematerialization and re-materialization. Paintings like Triad, Glitter in the Dark, and Pandom show us ghostly images of the artist and his siblings lost in an abstract local. Part Garden of Eden, part fairytale land, part psychotropic hallucination, these images evoke a space between worlds, or an effect of virtuality that issues from a quality of fluctuating finish. We can see this gap between the thing pictured and the work of ‘picturing’ in the contours of paintings like Erp, Cody, and The Kid — images that phase in and out of a painterly reality that owes as much to the works of Giuseppe Archimboldo as the Abstract Expressionists. One might even call them painterly holograms of a future antérieur, or images that operate without the substrate of a closed world or a secure horizon of meaning.

Even the persistence of boats of passage in Presneill’s paintings seem to point to the endless process of transitioning between worlds — past and present, geographic and imaginary, symbolic and personal. (see Monkeyboat, Untitled (boat), Drawing (boat), Enkidu (House), Raft Study 2 & 3, Ghost ship, Mirage, etc.).

And yet, Presneill’s greatest Egyptian hollography, (outside of Carry on Cleo and Pale Rider), would have to be Raft — a macabre reworking of Jericho’s Raft of the Medusa that gathers together a group of pictorial archetypes that are confronted with the catastrophe of their own co-existence set adrift under an apocalyptic sky. At sixteen by twenty-four feet it is a painting on par with the monumental works of Sandro Chia, Albert Olhen and Francesco Clemente — only where Chia focuses on historical themes, Olhen on the intersection of abstraction and technology, and Clemente on the development of a personal iconography — Presneill collapses all three of these dimensions into one and the same project.

While these postmodern forerunners only hinted at the appearance of a full-blown Egyptian effect, we can say, quite unabashedly, that with Presneill’s work it comes into sharp focus:

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The Egyptian effect implies the shift from a European Aesthetics of Greek derivation to an aesthetics modeled on pre-classical and non-European civilizations. This involves a melting away of many oppositions, as for example, those between original and copy, authentic and spurious, function and ornament. Confronted with the dizzying multiplication of imitations that are indistinguishable from their originals, with the extreme variety of syncretisms that stake their claim to consideration in their own right, and with the expansion of the notion of function to cover even the psychological and emotional aspects of experience, the mooring of European aesthetics begin to work loose, exacerbating both disorientation and confusion. The notions of purity and authenticity seem to be submerged in boundless formal and conceptual promiscuity... This implies a profound overhaul of the very concept of art, the starting point of which might be provided for by a reappraisal of the art forms Hegel described as ‘symbolic’ (from the art of the Egyptians to the non-figurative art of the Jewish and Muslim sublime). Two apparently opposed critical outlooks can be seen to hybridize and blend: one focusing on the very latest developments in technology, the technical reproducibility of works of art, video technology and electronics; the other focusing on more emotional dimensions of experience and states of possession and rapture. Neo-eclecticism and neo-romanticism are basically rather inadequate formulations for these critical trends, the first of which seems to look to the present, the other to the past. For what we are really seeking... is the variety of experience and joy of a certain past, while what we look for in the anthropological past is a copy and a repetition of the present.7 In no uncertain terms, the Egyptian effect represents the final horizon of the post-historical drive — the deconstruction not just of a single genre or tradition, but the deconstruction of Tradition(s) with a capital T. As such, the critical function of Presneill’s works would first seem to be a rather impossible one, or at least, it would appear to us as something we haven’t really seen before. But what makes such a claim justifiable, especially in an age that continuously repeats the idea that there is nothing new under the sun, that everything has been done before, and that all is simulacra?

In order to answer such a question, it is necessary not only to look at a longer trajectory of art production but also the a priori conditions of ‘critique’. If one thinks of impressionism as the deconstruction of academic finishing techniques; of cubism as the deconstruction of perspectival systems; of Fauvism as the deconstruction of naturalistic coloration; of Surrealism as the deconstruction of rationality; of Abstraction as the deconstruction of every representational bias; of Op-art as the deconstruction of stable subject-object relations; of Happenings as the deconstruction of art and life; of Conceptual art as the deconstruction of objecthood; of Minimalism as the deconstruction of expressivity; of Institutional Critique as the deconstruction of systems of valorization; of Feminist art as the deconstruction of phallocentric forms of domination; of Photorealism as the deconstruction of photography’s supposed naturalism; of Neo-geo as the deconstruction of ‘pure’ geometries; and of Pluralism as the deconstruction of the avant-garde ideal tout court —— then, with Presneill’s works, we are certainly encountering something altogether different. In fact, if Pluralism opens onto the first meta-deconstructive act, one aimed at a tradition internal to the Western canon (avant-gardism), then with the Egyptian effect we are experiencing the deconstruction of two meta-discursive categories8 — Western and Egyptian — as well as the systems of privilege and hierarchy that adhere to both. In this way we move from the either/or logic of avant-gardism to the or, or, or... of Pluralism to the Both/And of the Egyptian effect — some-

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thing that is clearly present in Presneill’s work.9 Semiology and Sarcophagi.

As part of this (meta)deconstructive dialog, we can better understand Presneill’s project as an effort to render that which is immanently familiar uncanny; as a means of making western art and art history a thing unknown to us; and as a concerted effort at denying every form of confidence about what is constitutive of ‘presence’ in the present. In this regard, Presneill’s work is a balancing act unlike any other, one which operates by “the confidence that anything can find its chance... that late and early are tactical rather than strategic notions.”10 Indeed, his work might even be characterized as an art of utility — grabbing what is necessary in the moment in order to upend the fictions of the past. This rotary motion between displaced images and unmoored symbols might even be described as a practice of counter-archivization, or at least, as a retroversive impulse that haunts the supposed stability of every semiological and/or sarcophograpic order.

We could even go to the end, and say that this kind of neo-Egyptian operation comes very close to mirroring “the Egyptian myth, (where) there will always be an Isis to piece together the scattered limbs of Osiris.”11 But much like the labor of Isis, Presneill’s imagery also shows us that a metaphysical body can never be properly reassembled, i.e., that Osiris will forever be haunted by a primal lack, an unassailable impotency, and an improbable form of reincarnation. In other words, art after the Egyptian effect will partake of a wholly deconstructed nature, having been cut into a million little pieces, first by modernism, then by postmodernism.

And yet, only negativity and dissemblance can continue to provide a challenge to the logic of supersession and transcendence accorded to ‘historical’ cannonization. In our day, this challenge goes by the name of Pluralism, the post-historical condition, and even by the Egyptian effect, but this latest moniker includes one new twist. Rather than simply undermining the metaphysics of presence, the Egyptian operation becomes the sign of a profane act that everywhere attempts to return the metaphysics of pictorial grammar to the common vernacular of ‘culture’.12 Or, to put it somewhat differently, the Egyptian effect submits the infinity of representational acts to the conditions of finitude.

But finally, how is all of these achieved? How is a negative or deconstructive function attributed to a work of art in a post-avantgarde, post-critique era? Or, what is still left to be challenged, i.e., what does the Egyptian effect aim for? In Presneill’s works it consists of a Herculean effort to stack up representations at the same time that they threaten to come tumbling down; to challenge the last boundaries between cultural divisions; and to aim at cultural defamiliarization, decontextualization and defetishization in a global sense.

In other words, when it comes to the issue of aesthetic purity, good taste and pictorial mores of a given ‘kind’ or ‘type’, Presneill throws caution to the wind chasing after the hope of a kind of perverse inclusivity — an inclusivity implicated in every kind of difference — material, cultural, discursive, whatever. And this is a particularly difficult gesture in an era where the anti-aesthetic impulse has been all but naturalized. In fact, Presneill’s works walk a very fine line between what we might accept as fine art

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or illustration, being both a bit too rough and unfinished to be mistaken for a commercial endeavor while also resisting the types of choices associated with the So Cal school of bad painting, the idiosyncratic figuration of the Bay area or even the Neo-expressionists. This too, is part of their enigmatic character, where we expect to find another infant terrible or a pictorial auteur, we are instead confronted with the problem of an Egyptian order(ing), where the writing on the wall is thrown back at us to be decoded.

Consequently, Presneill’s paintings not only force us to question our own bias’s about culture and taste, but they do this by moving between kitsch and coquettishness; an intimacy of reference and thematic dissonance; a tacit disrespect for formal constraints and an irreverent indulgence in pictorial pleasures. Yes, Presneill is still a provocateur in an age that has fewer and fewer such individuals, but he is also a very specific type of provocateur — one who relishes in the anonymity and the agency of the scribe. Alongside Peter Sloterdijk’s recent reading of Deconstruction as the Egyptian moment par excellence, we can see how Presneill’s oeuvre consists of “a radical semiology that would show us how the signs of being never provide the wealth of meaning they promise...” but also, that we may have no way beyond this doublebind.13 In fact, his images show us “how Egypt works in us: ‘Egyptian is the term for all the constructs that can be subjected to deconstruction — except the pyramid, the most Egyptian of edifices. It stands in its place for all time, because its form is nothing other than the undeconstructable remainder of a construction that, following the plan of the architect, is built to look as it would after its own collapse.”14 Max Presneill’s work is also one such pyramid, a pyramid which challenges us to question the last undeconstructable remainder of Western metaphysics, or a cultural construct that is increasing built to look as it would after its own collapse.

Grant Vetter 2012 Grant Vetter is the author of The Architecture of Control. He is also the Founder of The New Institute for Contemporary Art, Tempe, AZ as well as the gallery director of Autonomie, Los Angeles, and a board member of FAR (Foundation for Art Resources) also in Los Angeles, a non-profit organization which has put on critical art exhibitions since 1977.

Endnotes.

1 Mario Perniola. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (New York, Verso, 1995) 74.

2 As Perniola notes in “The Erotics of Transit”, “The passage guaranteed by art is from the same to the same.” While Perniola is here speaking about the transformation of Amor from a “savage passion” to a “peaceful art”, how much greater is this description for describing our transition from avantgardism to pluralism? This taming of the passions, “where the reader of the poem becomes and expert, (only to) find new loves” is also an apt description of the rotary motion that occurs in Presneill’s work. Mario Perniola. Ritual Thinking: Sexuality, Death, World. (New York: Humanity Books, 2001) 67, 67, 67, 67.

3 Mario Perniola. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (New York, Verso, 1995) 75.

4 Mario Perniola. Ritual Thinking: Sexuality, Death, World. (New York: Humanity Books, 2001) 214.

5 Mario Perniola. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (New York, Verso, 1995) 76.

6 Ibid. 76.

7 Ibid. 77-78.

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8 The use of the term ‘meta-discursive category’ here refers to the Western culture, which could be further broken down into premodern, modern and postmodern periods, and then further into specific eras, movements, etc. Of course, the history of the West could just as easily be broken up into the Ancient world, the Dark ages, Modernity and Postmodernity, or any other number of divisions. In this sense, meta-discursive is always a generic demarcation or an arborescent concept.

9 Or, to place it in Hegelian terms, the avant-garde is the negation of tradition, pluralism, the negation of the negation (the return of all tradition as equivalent), which is followed by a properly synthetic moment where all traditions are seen as equally deconstructable.

10 Mario Perniola. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (New York, Verso, 1995) 76.

11 Mario Perniola. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (New York, Verso, 1995) 76.

12 With regard to Presneill’s work this could refer either to Agamben’s use of profanation as making “a new use possible”, or Patrick O’Conner’s reading of Deconstruction as a phenomenology of the extra-mundane. Or, one could really combine these two readings in positing the idea that Presneill’s art practice returns culture to a “common use” in the form of pictograms composed of a phenomenology of the extra-mundane. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2007) 87. 87. Also, see Patrick O’Conner, Derrida: Profanations (New York: Continuum, 2010).

13 Peter Sloterdijk. Derrida, An Egyptian: On the problem of the Jewish Pyramid. (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 27.

14 Ibid. 28.

“The Egyptian pharaoh was surely the first to give the human individual the structure of the measureless will to be that set him upright above the surface of the earth as a kind of luminous and living edifice. When individuals — long after the era of the great pyramids — have wanted to acquire immortality, they have had to appropriate the Osirian myths and the funeral rites that formerly had been the privilege of the sovereign... The existing pyramids still bear witness to this calm triumph of unwavering and hallucinating resolve: they are not only the most ancient and vastest monuments man has ever constructed, but they are still, even today, the most enduring... In their imperishable unity, the pyramids — endlessly — continue to crystallize the mobile succession of various ages; alongside the Nile, they rise up like the totality of centuries, taking on the immobility of stone and watching all men die, one after another: they transcend the intolerable void that time opens under men’s feet, for all possible movement is halted in their geometric surfaces: IT SEEMS THAT THEY MAINTIAN WHAT ESCAPES FROM THE DYING MAN.” George Bataille Visions of Excess Obelisks Respond to the Pyramids “In the symbolist model of ancient Egypt, at least two concurrent, simultaneous levels are at work in any given instance. One is the study of Egypt as a civilization that existed in a factual geographic place and time, its peoples, mythology, social forms, its chronological unfolding, its monuments and artifacts, but this is only a backdrop, or support, for another Egypt, which might be called a quality of intelligence.This Egypt is outside of chronological consideration; it is rather, both an ever present and recurring possibility of consciousness. “ Robert Lawlor Sacred Geometry: Philosophy & Practice

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IMAGES

2012, Emissaries, oil and enamel on canvas, 84” x 96”

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2013, A Call to Arms (Washington), oil and enamel on canvas, 60” x 48”

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2013, The Machinery of Rebellion (Spartacus), oil and enamel on canvas, 84” x 65”

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2014, Resist, oil, acrylic and enamel on canvas, 60” x 50”

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2014, Choices for the Chidless, oil and enamel on canvas, 72” x 68”

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2014, LaLena Leading the Family, oil and enamel on canvas, 60” x 60”

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2014, Charon (Raft), oil and enamel on canvas, 96” x 96”

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2014, Hex (Raft), oil and enamel on canvas, 96” x 96”

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2014, Leonidas and the Nature of Tragedy, oil and enamel on canvas, 72� x 60�

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2014, Guernica Lost, oil and enamel on canvas, 72” x 60”

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2014, Tweedle, oil, acrylic and enamel on canvas, 48” x 58”

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2014, STOP, oil and enamel on canvas, 60” x 72”

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M AX P R E SN E I LL EXHIBITIONS SOLO & 2 PERSON 2015 From The Barricades, Freies Museum, Berlin, Germany

Notes From Another Raft, Garboushian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA (catalog) 2014 Anarchy & Other Things To Think About, University Art Gallery, CSU Stanislaus, CA (catalog) 2012 The Captain’s Tale (BH) OR The Liminal Egyptian, Garboushian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA (catalog)

The Captain’s Tale (New Bedford) - From Mocha to Moby, New Bedford Art Museum, Vault Series (catalog)

You Sunk My Battleship!, Autonomie, Los Angeles, CA with 2010 Glossolalia and Other Stories, Garboushian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA (catalog)

A Scattered Thought, POST, Los Angeles, CA - with Jason Ramos 2007 Wish List, Freight & Volume, New York City

ANFSCD, La Estacion Arte Contemporaneo, Chihuahua, Mexico 2003 Turschlusspanik, Kontainer Gallery (now Nicodim Gallery), Los Angeles

GAP, SCA Gallery, Pomona, CA 2001 Travails, West Gallery, Fullerton, CA 2000 Logocentricity, Cypress College Gallery, CA GROUP 2015 Angels With Dirty Faces, Hilger Contemporary, Vienna, Austria

MAS Attack #8, San Diego Art Institute, CA

Pure Paint for Now People, Weber State University Gallery, Utah

LA>>PDX, Duplex Collective, Portland, Oregon

MAS Attack #9, New Institute of Contemporary Art, Tempe, New Mexico 2014

An American Water Margin, University Museum, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, China Communard, Espace des Arts Sans Frontieres, Paris, France Exquisite Corpse, Mass Gallery, Austin, Texas (catalog) MAS Attack #7, Santa Monica Art Studios, CA The Status of Portraiture, Autonomie, Los Angeles, CA MAS Attack #5, Creative Albuquerque, New Mexico Project LALO, Campbell Works Gallery, London, UK Project LALO, Project Number Gallery, London, UK MAS Attack #4, Vast Space Projects, Las Vegas, Nevada Mind the Gap: London - LA Dialogues, Autonomie, Los Angeles One For The Road, Hudson Linc Gallery, Los Angeles, CA MAS Attack #3, Studio 17, San Francisco, CA LA N CV, Coachella Valley Art Center, CA In 2040, JAUS, Los Angeles, CA Singapore Art Fair, with Gallery Lara (Tokyo), Singapore Year 4, Autonomie, Los Angeles, CA

2013

Marginal Revolutions, KUAD Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey, 13th Istanbul Biennial The Familiar Unfamiliar, with Manual History Machines, Joshua Tree, CA Sense and Sensibility, Mt San Antonio College Art Gallery, CA Marooned, JAUS, Los Angeles, CA Overload, Garboushian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA Hong Kong Art Fair, with Gallery Lara (Tokyo), Hong Kong

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The Interior Forest, with Alexandra Grant, 18th St Arts, Santa Monica, CA Unsolved Mysteries, POST, Los Angeles, CA Critology, Art Museum of Western Carolina University (catalog) Year 3, Autonomie, Los Angeles, CA ConFiguring LA: What’s The Story, POST, Los Angeles, CA Critology, Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles MAS Attack #2, Torrance Art Museum, CA Savage Sentimentality (part 2), Autonomie, Los Angeles, CA 200 Clams, XVY Gallery, Los Angeles MAS Attack #1, LA Mart, Los Angeles, CA

2012

The New Cool School, White Box Contemporary, San Diego, CA CO/LAB II, at Art Platform Art Fair, With Durden & Ray, Los Angeles, CA (catalog) Painting On Edge:Redux, D.E.N Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA Savage Sentimentality, Modified Arts, Phoenix, Arizona Do Not Go Gentle, Da Vinci Gallery, LACC, Los Angeles, CA Hong Kong Contemporary Art Fair, with Gallery Lara (Tokyo), Hong Kong The Gang’s All Here, Central Utah Art Center, Utah Center Of The Universe, Raid Projects, Los Angeles Painting On Edge, Autonomie, Los Angeles, CA House, Billet & Happ, Los Angeles Either Side of Gray, PS Zask Gallery, Rolling Hills, CA TCT (Santa Monica), Art@Michael’s, Santa Monica, CA (solo) Year II, Autonomie, Los Angeles, CA 99, Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine, CA Artist’s Tower of Protest, LA><ART, Culver City, CA Monster Drawing Rally, The Armory Center, Pasadena, CA Doubt, Contemporary Art Space, Riverside, CA Dig, Concord Project, Los Angeles, CA Oasis, Shangri-La, Joshua Tree, CA Beyond Nowness, McNish Gallery, Oxnard College, Oxnard, CA

2011

CO/LAB at Art Platform Art Fair, with Durden & Ray, Los Angeles, CA (catalog) La Cosa Nostra, Rheeway Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Role Reversal, Jose Drudis-Blada Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Vertigo, at 12th Floor Gallery, LA Mart, with Durden & Ray, Los Angeles, CA You First, curated by UFORA, OCCCA, Santa Ana, CA Re:Present, at 12th Floor Gallery, LA Mart, with Durden & Ray, Los Angeles, CA Chain Letter, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA Film:Shorts, Mark Moore Gallery (a D&R video project), Culver City, CA 13th Grade, POST, Los Angeles Social Being, Hudson/Linc, San Pedro, CA Polemically Small, curated by Edward Lucie Smith, Garboushian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA Future Perfect, Beautiful Decay, Los Angeles (print version) Los Angeles Art Show art fair, with Garboushian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA (catalog) Eagle Rock 9th Annual Art Auction, Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock, CA Year One, Commonspace and Raid Projects, Los Angeles, CA LACE Annual Auction, LA Mart, Los Angeles, CA Clare Foundation, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA

2010

L_ove A_lways, Galerie Lara, Tokyo, Japan

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The Bigger Picture, Edgar Varela Projects, Los Angeles, CA

San Diego Art Fair, with Durden & Ray Fine Art, San Diego, CA (catalog)

Durden & Ray Presents, Phantom Galleries, Long Beach, CA

Nice To Meet You, Sloan Fine Art, New York

Economy of Gesture, Performing Public Space Project for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), CA 2009

Here, Now, Us, ARTRA, Los Angeles, CA (catalog) RPLA, Raid Projects, Los Angeles, CA Invisible Empire, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands On The Shoulders of Davids, JAUS, Los Angeles, CA Rant, Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, CA PS 1999 – 2009, Kunstruimte09, Groningen, Netherlands Manifestations, Carl Berg Projects, West Hollywood, CA Psychic Hearts, La Verne University Gallery, La Verne, CA Doin’ It, Kruglak Gallery, Mira Costa, CA Tupajumi, Hudson Museum, Rotterdam, Netherlands Gunshow, Space B, New York City

2008

Traces of When, Raid Projects, Los Angeles, CA “um…My, gallery”, The Brewery Arts Complex, Los Angeles, CA From Similar Origins to Remarkable Visions, Main Art Gallery, CSUF, Fullerton, CA Plush, Eagle Rock Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock, CA

2007

artLA Art Fair, Los Angeles, with Raid FC (catalog)

2006

Sex Sells, Red House Gallery, Venice Beach, CA (as part of artLA)

2005

Quickening, MOCA, Tuscon, AZ Just Visiting, Huntington Beach Art Center artLA. The LA art fair, LA, with Raid Projects (catalog) A Warlike People, M Gallery, Phoenix, Arizona, curated by Lara Taubman Register The Distance, Borusan Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey, curated by Beral Madra (catalog)

2004

The Armory Show, New York LA Driveby Part 2, MOP Gallery, Sydney, Australia LA Driveby Part 1, Kyubidou Gallery, Tokyo, Japan Network, De Parel, Amsterdam, Netherlands (catalog) Nexus 1 by nTOPIA, Art and Idea, Mexico City PLA, Raid Projects, Los Angeles

2003

Midas, POST, Los Angeles Raid In Chicago, Standard Gallery, Chicago Scope Art Fair, Standard Hotel, Los Angeles Tinsel Town, Domestic Setting, Los Angeles Images of Desire 2, Winston Hotel, Amsterdam Fragment, PS Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands Miniatures, Kyubidou Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (catalog) The Stray Show Art Fair, Chicago

2002

Curatorial Market, Cuchifritos Gallery, New York (catalog)

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Images Of Desire, Fields Gallery, Amsterdam Netherlands Cross Currents, Deutsch Bank, London, UK Dreamcatcher, RA Gallery, Kiev, Ukraine The Stray Show Art Fair, Chicago Glamour Trip So Soon To Slip, Sheehan Gallery, WA (catalog) Animal Instinct, Cerritos College Gallery, CA GIANT, Three Mills Studio, London, UK

2001

100% Rag, POST, LA Ever Since Icarus, Lord Mori Gallery, Chinatown, LA (catalog) New Video, Gallery Hana, Austin, TX For Example, Acuna Hansen Gallery, Chinatown, LA Rising Tide, O.C. Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA (catalog) Su-Su-Superego, San Bernadino College Gallery, CA Sound And Vision, Program 12, LA

2000

Phase 3, EGCA Gallery, Santa Ana, CA Wall Space, Miller Durazo Gallery, LA 10 Degrees Of Abstraction, Biola University Gallery, LA Strangeland, Andrew Shire Gallery, LA Intraconnections, Don O’Melveny Gallery, LA

1999

Desire, Eye Five Gallery, LA (catalog) Strange Bedfellows, Webster Gallery, Santa Ana, CA Simon Rondelet International Video Art Show, The Bullet Museum, New York Land Of Extreme Happiness, SMAC Truck Show, LA (catalog)

1998

10th Annual Juried Show, Irvine Fine Arts Center, CA IV, EGCA Gallery, Santa Ana, CA

1997

BLOC, Workstation Gallery, Sheffield, UK Contemporary Diversions, Clocktower Gallery, Sheffield, UK

1996

Spellbound, Octagon Center, Sheffield, UK SCAT, The Mappin Gallery, Sheffield, UK Stockport Open, Stockport City Art Gallery, UK

1995

Derby Open, Derby City Art Gallery, UK Scattered, Doncaster City Art Gallery, UK

1994

Morbid Symptoms, Leeds Metro University Gallery, UK (catalog) Pullit 8, Pullit Gallery, London, UK Brute Farce, Yorkshire Art Space, Sheffield, UK (with Craig Knight) Climate, Cool Tan Gallery, London, UK

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ART IS T STAT E M E N T Max Presneill is a Los Angeles based painter and curator who shows throughout the US and internationally. As the Director/Curator of the Torrance Art Museum and the Curatorial Director of ARTRA Curatorial his general artistic concerns are often reflected in his curatorial projects.

Utilizing sources from the Internet, a Web-surfing flaneur’s take, photographs from my own life, art historical references, and intuitive decision-making when painting, I reflect upon the relationship between fact and fiction as well as past and present. Within reconstructed histories and mythologized experiences, the forged connections that play between remembering and invention act as considerations of the nature of reality, power and identity. In the end, the paintings are the remnants and evidence of the cognitive, problem-solving nature of painting and the human experience, or at least mine.

The canvas is an arena of intellectual combat and physical engagement. I fight against what I already know so as to learn something new, to shift my boundaries, to challenge my limitations, to discover ways to visually represent the world and ideas, in particular the notions of power and mortality. Do something, do something else, try again, change. Question taste. Push against the soothing suggestion of making nice or beautiful paintings. Fight for difficulty, not ease, for opening up avenues and not closing them down. Learn to relook. This is what painting is for me.

Content Max Presneill’s current work explores the notion of the self and its relationship to others, memory, the political, the digital world and shared cultural histories. By sourcing from areas of his past, personal obsessions and culturally shared phenomena and histories, Presneill’s paintings seek to address issues of attention, interpretation, facticity, the politics of representation and the generation of meaning.

By continuously painting over each work, Presneill leaves layers and creates new ones to develop a dynamic and liminal space in which the meanings can be retuned and realigned in constant flux, reflecting the stream of ideas and influences that shape our perceptions. This also means that many paintings are many years in the making, and this process is halted only when the work is on display outside of the studio. If acquired by an individual or institution they remain locked in time, frozen as they are, but if returned to the studio they again become part of the never-ending cycle of amendments. Often created by taking other artists’ rejected canvases as a starting point these layered paintings impose another way of reading the work. They generate new complexities through new applications, the conceptual reasoning behind the implication of community, the importance of peers, as well as the destructive act.

The narrative elements allude to situations, both specific and general, factual and imagined, that place the importance of the act of painting within a set of existential, self-affirmed constructions of reality and value. Isolated, decontextualized or reconfigured, they singularly float in a river of uncertainty, like our own reflection in still water, somewhat familiar but not quite self — what is seen differing from what is felt. The hermetic, subjective experience and shared cultural expressions constantly oscillate between understanding and illegibility, with a sense of melancholic loss

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and moments of celebration. They exist within the gaps between things as both personal story and political metaphor.

The Shields Alongside imagery taken from personal photographs, the faceted areas which sometimes surround the narrative subjects recall the Holtzman shields from David Lynch’s film version of the Frank Herbert novel “Dune.” And more recently some increasingly abstract paintings have been concentrating on the shield itself rather than the contained characters. While an acknowledgement of the relationship to early forms of cubism is obvious, it should be read as a reference only. The shifting, fluid nature implied by these angular planes attests rather to the similar role of personality, of meaning, of belief. All are transient and unstable, unknowable in the full — only as partial points, like shards of a broken mirror. They also function as rudimentary pixels of a simplified and smaller digitized persona in the Internet Age. The Cloud Presneill has often shown his smaller paintings in groupings referred to as “the cloud.” This cloud contains multiple canvases that act — by the location of their installation, in reference to each other and in the sequence of their placement — as extended narratives that include materials taken from autobiographical sources, the Internet, literature, and the history of art, among other places. They exist in a fluid, interchangeable relationship that allows them to be renewed with each showing, to have some removed and some replaced, with no set number of pieces and no continuous members within the grouping. This reflects the artist’s changing focal points of interest and establishes new ways of reading the material that mirror ongoing concerns and engagements.

What you see here is NOT what you get...

By taking “inaccurate” photographs of my work for publication in catalogs and online, I want to stress the difference between the image and seeing the actual work in the context of a gallery wall — the real-life interaction as opposed to the Digital - online or printed ones. Whether the reproduction is inaccurate due to color differences, shadow or reflecting light, or because it has been partially repainted since the photograph was taken, these photographs separate the real from the copy. The emphasis is on seeing them in the flesh. Anything else is but a shadow on a cave wall.

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AC K N OWLEDGEME NTS California State University Stanislaus

Dr. Joseph F. Sheley, President

Dr. James T. Strong, Provost/Vice President of Academic Affairs

Dr. James A. Tuedio, Dean, College of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Department of Art

Dr. Roxanne Robbin, Chair, Professor

Dean De Cocker, Professor

Daniel Edwards, Assistant Professor

Jessica Gomula, Professor

David Olivant, Professor

Gordon Senior, Professor

Richard Savini, Professor

Dr. Staci Scheiwiller, Assistant Professor

Meg Broderick, Administrative Support Assistant II

Andrew Cain, Instructional Technician I

Jon Kithcart, Equipment Technician II

University Art Gallery

Dean De Cocker, Director

The artist wishes to thank Grant Vetter for writing the wonderful essay, Dean DeCocker for the opportunity to show his work, Nic Webber for the design work on the promotinal materials for the show and LaLena Lewark for everything else.

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California State University Stanislaus University Art Gallery | One University Cir, Turlock, CA 95382