Opening Reception: Thursday, September 7, 6:00-9:00 pm
Open Gallery Hours to be posted soon. Additional programming, including an artist talk, will be announced by the gallery.
As Wallace Stevens once said, there is always “a poem at the heart of things.” Manipulated and damaged by imperialist capitalism, today’s society finds itself at the receiving end of the topoi and structures of nature manufactured and presented as commodities. Everything seems to be given so as to be experienced in a certain predetermined way. That which is essential and that which is accidental are often conflated and left undifferentiated. Yet even amid the ongoing depredations of nature and culture by these factors, art is one path (and one of the sole remaining paths) that seeks to find a way out, an exit beyond this current dilemma and impasse.
In PASSAGE, the painter Wade Schuster articulates this path by utilizing the “material” of his observations, remembrances and traces of the cityscape and landscape. Not limiting his process to a one-sided retention within the “inside” and the “interior” but always circling back to include the “outside” and the topoi of the external, Schuster’s paintings weave together context and imaginal, felt response and recognition of what is beyond the perceiving ego, emotional affect along with social concern. Thus painting itself, as one of the most storied and freighted of all art genres, takes on a new meaning and a new purpose. As he mentions in his artist statement, his work “avoids subjective construction” and insists on sustained and sustaining connection with the outside world, in whatever way it is experienced. Isn’t that what we need more of today? For Schuster, things encountered in his many walks once again become faces that speak and to which his attentive ear attempts to apprehend and translate into the visual language provided by his rich knowledge and handling of painting.
Wade Schuster is an artist and art educator originally from Madison, Wisconsin. He received his BA in Art Education from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and his MFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. He has exhibited widely, with works held in both public and private collections, including the permanent collection of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas, Nevada. Schuster currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
(This exhibition was generously supported by The Ford Family Foundation, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) and Prosper Portland.)