DRAWING LINES: CONTEMPORARY WORKS ON PAPER

Inevitable Objects is pleased to present an exhibition of works on paper by four contemporary, mid-career artists, offering viewers an opportunity to see a diverse range of approaches to this traditional medium.  While the works in the exhibition share visual qualities such as layering, strength, balance and polish, viewers can perceive each artist’s unique motivations and preoccupations, and how they use their work to take stands and draw lines.

Jared Lindsay Clark’s improvisational, rhythmic drawings recall the work of Arshile Gorky, Joan Miró, and Brice Marden, but his voice and his facility are entirely his own. Clark’s meandering marks are channeling something organic, something biological, a force that breathes life into them.  Flowing, looping, branching lines divide and fill the space, edge to edge and top to bottom.  These images conjure natural structures, from minute networks of neurons to the routes of the circulatory system or avian migratory patterns. The resemblances are not just superficial; the intuition that drives one drives the other, and as a result the experience of these drawings connects both Clark and his viewers to the actual living, pulsating world.

Sean Morello’s 60-Minute Chair Drawing (2004) is the result of a specific predefined artistic process he devised, with the intention of investigating how an artist’s personality and presence can become integrated into a work of art.  The artist spent one hour in a more-or-less fixed position, observing a metal folding chair through a sheet of plexiglass.  During this period, he methodically traced and retraced the contours of the chair on the surface of the glass using a grease pencil.  At the end of the hour, the drawing was transferred to a sheet of paper.  The resulting artwork is a record of both the shape of the chair and the movements of the artist, which caused the chair's relative position to continually shift and change.  This tangle of angular black lines is an artifact of a staged event: the intersection of a static and familiar object with an active, fluid, but perhaps inaccessible artist.

Adam Bateman’s work, It’s Pink (2016), is part of a series of Field Paintings in which the artist explores the past and present of the American West. He deploys gestural painterly moves inspired by the marks left on the land by plowing, planting, irrigating, and harvesting. After depositing a heavy layer of acrylic colors and spray enamel onto the paper,  Bateman creates deep gouges in the surface to expose the under-layers and leave behind a concentric pattern of furrows and ridges.

Roland Thompson’s Yw-T2 (2014) is a collage of bends and bars, expertly hand-cut from Color-Aid papers. At once layered and flat, the appearance is like a collection of fallen limbs gathered from a forest of exotic typography. The arrangement has been crafted with such precision that it suggests a mechanical drawing or a diagram of integrated circuitry.  It comes as no surprise that the artist is reaching for, in his own words, "a visualization of a network of connections between people, places, and things across time and space."

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Jared Lindsay Clark went to Richmond's Virginia Commonwealth University where he earned his MFA in painting and new genres. While at VCU he was awarded the Dedalus Foundation Fellowship and a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship. Clark has since been awarded residencies at Art Omi, Vermont Studio Center, Kompact Living Space and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art.  He also received the Utah Arts Council Fellowship, and a solo exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art.

Sean Morello works primarily in painting and photography.  He received an MFA from Pratt Institute in 2005.  His work has been exhibited widely, including a 2015 solo exhibition at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, and exhibitions at HPGRP Gallery, Pierogi Gallery, GAGA Arts Center, Gallery Boreas.  Morello was the subject of a solo exhibition at Inevitable Objects in 2023. 

Adam Bateman's work has been exhibited globally, including in museum exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Fine Art, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, the BYU Museum of Art, the Schnieder Art Museum, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the Akurari Art Museum, Disjecta, and the Barrick Museum.  He received an MFA from Pratt Institute and is a recipient of the Utah Artist Fellowship and the Joan Mitchell Fellowship.  Bateman was the subject of a solo exhibition at Inevitable Objects in 2023. 

Roland Thompson received a BFA from Brigham Young University in 1998 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2001. Thompson has been featured in notable group exhibitions, including Random Order, White Columns, New York (2003); Reductive, Mahan Gallery, Ohio (2006); Post-Geometric, ParisCONCRET, Paris (2012); Friendly Takeover- Artists Show Their Collection (Katharina Grosse), Marta Herford, Germany (2014); and a solo exhibit titled Recur at CUAC, Utah (2011).