Material is pleased to present Loot Box: New/Recent Works On/Of Paper, a solo exhibition by the Kansas City-based artist Garry Noland. The exhibition centers on the Plan-O-Gram series, combining acrylic, latex, baking soda, spray paint, and non-skid tape on paper. Materials sourced from hardware stores, supermarkets, and the residue of daily life. In Noland's hands, the industrial and the domestic become equal players in a formal language that is rigorous without being rigid, systematic without foreclosing surprise.
The title Loot Box evokes accumulation, randomness, and the surprise of contents unknown until opened: a fitting frame for a practice built on chance arrangements and the discovery of meaning through proximity. Each work proposes an answer and immediately complicates it, layering collaged printed matter beneath brushed and sprayed surfaces so that the past is never fully buried, only renegotiated.
Noland's process is openly attentive to chance. He speaks of rough patches, glitches, and mistakes not as aberrations to be corrected but as events to be read: moments where the material asserts its own logic and the artist must decide whether to follow. The resulting works carry this history of negotiation visibly. Edges are sites of meaning. Seams do not close. The surface remains a record of decisions made and unmade.
This is painting that thinks about what it means to be next to something: in a composition, in a room, in a world. Noland's long-standing commitment to a multi-disciplinary practice, encompassing drawing, printmaking, collage, and object-making, informs the density of these works even when the gesture appears simple. Nothing here is incidental. Everything has been placed, however lightly, with the understanding that placement is already an argument.
The exhibition takes its cue from Noland's own articulation of art's role: to find the mundane in the grand and the grand in the mundane. Loot Box is neither modest nor monumental. It occupies the charged, uncomfortable space between those two conditions, which is precisely where the most interesting looking happens.

THE LOOT BOX

Garry Noland’s paintings and photographic collages are highly compelling, but even so he leaves the viewer betwixt and between. He shapeshifts from one process to another and even includes his great - grandmother’s rugs in his installation. Is there a personal message from the artist in this cacophany of materials and color? Is there a thread that courses through the diversity and progression of his artwork?
Subtle as Noland may be, he has overarching concerns on certain subjects about which he feels deeply. It is important to note that Noland is also an art historian, writer and curator, as well as an informal mentor to many young artists. His practice cuts a broad swath into the history of Western art as well as his own ancestral heritage, resulting in art that is introspective as well as part homage and part discourse.
His Plan-0-Gram paintings, Novelty Landscapes and Estella Renick’s handmade rag rugs reference some of the dominant art investigations of the last 100 years.
Everything from baking soda to acrylic, latex and spray paint make up his ode to process art in his multi-layered Plan-O-Gram wallworks, along with citations to wall sculpture and post-minimalism.
The rag rugs, allusions to the Pattern and Decoration movement, honor not just the overlooked craft of women’s art but that of laborers in general. And his Novelty Landscapes have the wry wit of the Picture generation, artists who challenged the veracity of what is portrayed in the media.
Underscoring all this is his conviction that the present is informed by the past, even when our culture acknowledges only vestigial aspects of our history. Noland has said that he is just one of a long line of artists that have shaped the esthetic record and he builds on what others have done before. In his Plan-O-Gram works the top colorful geometric elements are stacked upon layers of materials that waver between the pretty and the discarded. We may not know exactly what is inside that pile but the top forms could not exist without that support.
In earlier work Noland challenged the legitimacy of certain facts being portrayed as the truth in everything from maps to scientific journals. In his Novelty Landscapes he seamlessly juxtaposes scenes that don’t belong together, although it takes a minute for the viewer to recognize that. In “Novelty Landscape (Ohio)” a bucolic family scene from the sixties is juxtaposed with a mountainscape in the distance. There are any number of possible surreal takes on this work, now that we know that notions of the perfect white family in mid-century America were often false.
“Paintings on Pedestals” also comment on concepts of family, as Noland resurfaces family cabinet doors he grew up with. These pieces complicate any single take on familial tropes, because here he takes standard doors and adorns them. His great grandmother’s rag rugs are inherited treasures. Once again, Noland reveals that our personal past also informs our present, and implies that is our duty to expand, even improve upon, that which has shaped us, as well as acknowledge the unseen, underappreciated efforts of those who have molded us. As Noland tells us again and again, there is no one right answer in life’s complicated scenarios, but we do better if we look back as opposed to moving forward as fast as we can.
Elisabeth Kirsch


Elisabeth Kirsch is an art historian, curator and writer who has curated over 80 exhibitions and written numerous essays and critiques for art magazines, museums and galleries throughout the country.

58th Annual Citation Show

Roberta Smith, former art critic for the New York Times, wrote this regarding an exhibit by American artist Ray Johnson in 2015:
“Mr. Johnson’s efforts teem with art-world names and related iconography,
But what I like best about them is, again, never being quite sure how a piece came to be…these collages begin with the unending mystery of how they were made, which still looks new. ”

The last sentence is crucial. What Johnson cracks open (and Smith sees it) is a wormhole into the artist’s process…into a work’s moment of creation. We’re given clues, through comedy and mystery, to how and when a work was made. Art comes from clues (glitches) stumbled upon, intuited or learned from dedicated studio practice. Glitches imply the verbs of making. Verbs, as in nature, produce the nouns we make and see around us. Art, lumped in with every other noun, is in uneasy territory. My job here is to pick things out and give it a number. It’s fraught with inequity. If artists truly mimic nature’s processes then to hand out prizes suggests a hierarchy. We’re not entitled to say, for instance, that this cloud is better than that one. It might be different but its not second rate. So here goes.

The categories, Studio Art and Design (illustration) are interesting mainly because Art is always Design but Design is not always Art. The work I’ve selected for mention here leap beyond Design and into Art. Celissa McCurdy’s, very simple and elegant Taboo is great for what it needs to be. The font, kerning and messaging are perfect for the solitude of the color choices and geometry. Madeline Souder’s Untitled doughy-eyed cats eerily animate a lawn-like patch with strewn florals and butterflies. The cats are cute and a little threatening. Sunset’s Tidings, by Elizabeth Pierce, while illustrational, goes beyond being an adjunct to story telling. The painterly application of the graphic media is highly accomplished. It wants to BE a painting. These same qualities are seen in their Goode Night, Nuna.

In the Studio category. Ollie Willis’ Nude Study #6 and perhaps #7 is more than one thing. It’s a painted drawing or a drawn painting. I can’t decide which. The quick brevity of the brushwork is studied and deliberate without being labored. We all know what it feels like to weigh something and Willis convincingly positions these
bodies, sculpturally, in their space. Souder’s All My Love, is an image of newlyweds. It’s a collage in the best sense. Layers of nostalgia coexist with a contemporary kind of satire saying that everything you see (feel) may not be everything there is. We just don’t know who’s being taken for a ride here. Similarly, layers of technique and ways of seeing merge in Cassandra Scholten’s Homegrown Tomatoes. It could be illustrational but it could also be a painting or even surface design for textiles. The print seems to be about color even though its black and white. Sholten’s Jemime Puddleduck Dinnerware was a favorite of mine as well.

Coleman Hook’s Emerald Tunnel, is my selection for the exhibit’s Best of Show. From across the room, I didn’t know what it was. The photograph acts like a painting or drawing. Had it been just an “abstraction” or a design I don’t think I’d have voted for it.
From a distance it rewards us with one identity: an abstract design with a source of light at the center. Closer up we see it for what it is, a compelling image of mundane subject matter. The pier’s colonnade marches toward a kind of vanishing point that also reads as a light filled room at the end of a tunnel. Its full of symbolism.
This gets to what Art’s job is: to find the mundane in the grand and the grand in the mundane. It’s what we should seek in pictures and people.

Lisa Freiman, Cheif Curator, Indianapolis Art Museum chose my work for inclusion in New American Paintings Midwest Edition.

http://www.cupcakesinregalia.com/archivegarrynoland.html

http://www.pitch.com/kansascity/garry-noland-city-arts-projectthe-studios-inc/Content?oid=2755263