RetroVertigo

Waiting Room is pleased to announce RetroVertigo, an exhibition which gathers five painters who depict the dizzying effects of simultaneous histories - personal, collective, and art historical - using styles or fashions of past art movements and traditional genres, which collide with current pop and cultural references. Together this collection of paintings visually concur that Western Art History was neither linear, nor chronological, but rather partial and fractal, like a Tarantino film, capable of bouncing between Post-Impressionism, digital art, Surrealism, turning back to Roman sculpture, shifting to Dutch vanitas, then speeding us up to Post-Modernism and fast-forward to Laura Hoptman’s The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World; the inbound and outbound visual ‘clicks’ all networked and metaphorically hot within poly-stylized canvases. In Mathew Zefeldt’s large-scale acrylic paintings, an expanding arsenal of personal ‘characters’ – from video games to art history, to emoji, and studio detritus - float in patterned and gradient-swathed environments. Using repeating figures toinvert foreground and background relationships, and analog collage techniques that rival Photoshop, Zefeldt often breeds his motifs and compositions, creating genetic spawns, off-shoots and new branches of compositional family trees. Oakley Tapola solidly demonstrates comfort with figuration and the mutation thereof; in her work the figure functions as a personal and historical stand-in, who we find active in a distorted landscape, or making their way through a portal to an alternative narrative. Tapola grew up with artists as parents, and, from that personal history, she produces honest forms alongside patterns and poetic texts to place, and animate, her ideas on artistic and feminine identities. Garrett Perry’s pastel canvases exhibit an expert ease with paint and Easter egg layers of experiments lived out in the studio. He looks to art history books, contemporary art blogs, and other artists’ Tumblr sites for fodder which he quotes in his own paintings, borrowing from meme culture as easily as Matisse, Tal R, Peter Doig, or Flash Gordon. If Perry’s paintings look charming and inviting - and contrary to the myth of the tormented artist - they appear that way because Perry is in fact having fun making them. Classically trained as French atelier painter, Clea Felien produces technical cartwheels which integrate tight, highly-rendered environments in which machismo, gaudy, clunky impastoed subjects are placed. Felien often incorporates personal souvenirs in her work: shoes she’s never owned, the deer her car hit, imagery from dreams, and fictional mementos collected and hidden in the hulls and cargo containers on ships. Jonathan DeDedecker’s discusses his paintings as echoing chambers and frames-framing-frames for tombstones, negations, video games, music, found imagery, and contemporary and historical art references. A previous student of fellow exhibiting artist Zefeldt, this micro-historical connection might be exemplary of a modern day master-apprentice painting production, though only in the context of this moment perhaps - DeDecker is well on his way to carving out his own niche, spamming his own paintings with a buffet of new subjects and visual samples. Curated by Jehra Patrick - and admittedly ironic in it’s efforts to historicize or catalog current artistic activities - this exhibition details artists working to reactivate painted picture planes as dioramas; theoretical spatial environments, connected by wormholes, loud with historical cacophony, in which multiple styles, movements and narratives can coexist. The exhibition is welcomed by an opening reception on Friday, May 22, from 7–10 pm. Waiting Room is located in the historic Loring Corners building near Loring Park in Minneapolis. 1629 Hennepin Avenue Suite 300F Minneapolis, MN 55403 Please use alley entrance, opposite The Third Bird. The exhibition and gallery are open to the public Friday and Saturday from 12–4 pm and by appointment. For more information about the exhibition or gallery, or to make an appointment, please contact Waiting Room at info@waitingroomart.org