Inner Workings: On Garry Noland’s “Piece Work”
The show is called Piece Work. You will be compensated accordingly—
richly, for once—as you have tremendous productive capabilities. The
processes themselves are no mysteries. Everything has a logic, a way that it
works. Assemble these tiles. Peel up the tape. Shift this ink. There is no
difference between inner workings and outer appearance. You are a
productive viewer, working out what you see, exercising the piece’s
machinery, its responsiveness. Your eyes break the artwork down to pieces,
then reassemble it. Your work is monumental—geographic, even—but also
humble. This is Garry’s artistry. You are shadowing him for a day on the
job.
Garry Noland’s work is mapping the transformations in color, space, and
material that both natural processes and human work negotiate. It has
something for the historical materialist and the new materialist—for
champions of human labor and for believers in the vibrant agency of
matter itself. Through the salvaged materials he “elevates,” Garry shows
how objects can be put to human use while—and through—remaining
resolutely themselves.
Each artwork conveys its own organic individuality through palette,
texture, geometry, and formal principle. In each, Garry has attended to
some inner aesthetic working. Not his “inner,” but the piece’s. Tickets,
ladders, limestone deposits, pump jacks, axles, condensers, collapsed
slopes, and walking elephants have all made their appearances, though
Garry is more interested in capturing their logic on a formal level than
simply showing what they look like. That is to say, each piece works
differently. Like organisms, machines, or products, each contains the
movements of its own production within it, an energetic selfunderstanding,
a formal core. Then you come along, and the artwork
works on you, replicating its logic within you.
These formal logics are some of Garry’s great subjects. Grids, color fields,
seriality, the geometry of perspective, oscillations between foreground and
background, surface versus depth, plan and improvisation, illusion and
representation within material immediacy—all productive mechanisms
this or that piece will run on. Locating these formal riddles across media
and art historical influences, Garry continually hits “refresh” on art history,
investigating and updating what the work of the artwork is.
And how do things “work”? Machines work mechanically. Organisms work
organically. Thought works conceptually. Art works—aesthetically? I
suppose, but to me this really means it works on you, recapitulating the other
modes: a bit of the machine, a bit of the living thing, a bit of the
conceptual model.
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“Failed Axle,” the only sculpture in the show, is also the most obviously
machinic—even if the machine doesn’t work, since this wheel made of
bubble wrap and broken PVC pipe can’t take you anywhere. Heidegger
famously suggests that we don’t recognize the independent existence of an
object until it stops working. Only when a hammer breaks (in his example)
does it cease to be a mere tool for human activity and become, instead, a
mysterious, non-human thus-ness. Garry’s “Failed Axle,” which was made
broken, thus has ample opportunity to glitter forth its material richness. The
simple machine of axle and wheel has actually failed twice: the axle is
snapped in two, and the wheel—a roll of bubble wrap that sags under the
weight of PVC pipe encrusted in marbles—is more of a flat tire.
The only thing this wheel moves is light itself, though it performs its task
exceedingly well: it gathers the light, stores, processes, and distributes it.
The bubble wrap, layering crinkly gloss upon gloss, bubbles the room’s
ambient light through its clear plastic into a complex white. The dollarstore
marbles, like all marbles—no matter how cheap or worn—
immediately capture the eye. They mass into a knob rich in texture and
color, verdant with tiny moments of competing depths, surfaces, and
strata. This charm is probably one reason Garry has incorporated marbles
throughout much of his sculptural oeuvre. They’re humble yet divinely
spirited, and they suggest moss or microbes as much as human play or
factory production. It turns out there are a lot of directions this wheel can
take.
The formal core of this piece? The action of plugging in, perhaps: line
plugged into circle, marbles plugging pipe (the wheel’s literal core). And
the opposite: wheel unplugged from movement. The bubble wrap is a joke
of a tire, filled with air yet completely useless. Really, “Failed Axle” is
about venting as many ramifications as possible from the simple machine
of wheel and axle. It’s about watching what happens when non-standard
materials are used to act like that machine—de-inventing the wheel,
harnessing the resonances that result. “Failed Axle” holds these resonances
silently within itself until you, the viewer, enter the process as the final
hubcap that un-fails this axle, reinvents it, making the whole art–machine
work after all.
Garry focuses on “process,” on its simplicity, accidents, and sudden
complexities—though I have to put that word in quotes. What artist isn’t
interested in process? Each defines it to their liking and then lives in it. But
Garry’s process does not originate with him. He knows that activities
beyond himself create the things that end up in his hands and on his mind.
Industry, trades, crafts, sciences, ecosystems, geology, and weather all
shuttle material through their internal logics until—plunk—they suddenly
confront the artist. At this point Garry steps into the process, negotiates
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with it, sees how he’ll react from this position, from that position, pauses to
see what the material will do in turn.
That stepping-into-process creates things that are full of life, are just as
much verbs as they are nouns. They charm us with their compelling color
and tactility, engaging not just our eyes but our awareness of our
embodiment, our associations and memories—even our own capabilities.
Garry wants the piece to make you wonder how it was made, if you could
make it too. You stand alongside him in your imagination, working on the
piece, figuring it out, negotiating with the material, stumbling on new
ideas, accumulating a history of such work.
Art, then, is a workaday commitment to helping form accrete
meaningfully, even if not all practitioners are called “artists.” In this vein,
Garry has dedicated a wall to works by his great-grandmother Estella
Renick. These circular rag rugs fit the show precisely. Their central
concern is the spiral: how this ancient form, both mathematical and
organic, gains individual character through color. Garry imagines his
grandmother selecting hues randomly from a box of rags—essentially his
method, too, in artworks like the pixelated “Untitled.” Renick’s artistry is
in transforming what’s at hand, using old cloth to create an almost celestial
variegation, a mandala-like composure.
These qualities, along with the complete fusion of color with material
texture (here, that of knotted cloth), the room left for untidiness as a kind
of realism, and the enjoyment of sticking with a process, all suggest a
family resemblance. The rugs’ place in a “solo” show (and who among us
is truly “solo”?) conveys how deeply Garry feels these works are part of
him and his practice. He celebrates his great-grandmother’s work,
acknowledging her influence and that of folk crafts in general, and shows
that “art” is of a piece with work that goes on throughout human life.
Even more than it is visual, Garry’s minimalism is methodological: he has
continually emphasized his use of “simple verbs.” He employs these verbs
in repeated and modulated succession, and the activities that create one
piece often inadvertently create other pieces as well: scraps, fortuitous
residues, and analogue glitches can lead him down an unexpected path.
The pieces have histories of interacting with Garry that they carry forward
to interact with you.
It’s as if Garry’s activity has spring-loaded the artwork with potential
energy that then rebounds in the viewer. Your eyes sense what your hands
would feel were you to touch it: texture, edge, the reactivity of matter. The
paper or cardboard subtly ripples and warps; exposed to temperature
changes, humidity fluctuations, perhaps even battered by the elements
before Garry salvaged it, it breathes like a living thing whose history impels
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it forward. You could dig your fingernail under the tiles in “Overcoat,” feel
the springiness their combined tension lends the piece. If you push on the
art, it might quietly push back. You can imagine yourself interacting with
it physically, gently, as if it were alive. Perhaps you could have even made it
yourself ?
The term “piece work” refers to compensation based on production rather
than time. Each unit produced or task performed ticks up the worker’s pay
at an agreed-upon rate. It’s an employment model that works best for
repetitive, standardized tasks in fields such as agriculture, manufacturing,
and crowd-sourced micro-work. While such a model could reward the
labor that goes into making something, it can also be used as an excuse to
pay people less, to force quantity over quality. The title of this show nods
to these conditions and acknowledges solidarity with them. Artists also
work piece by piece, don’t they?
Being around an artist or a writer will teach you that a lot of work goes
into hiding work, into making a final product look effortless. That’s part of
the artist’s skill, but it’s also how our world maintains its illusion of
smoothness, instantaneity, and comfort. Time and labor get obfuscated:
artists don’t timestamp their brushstrokes, nor do I know how long it took
to make my coat. Showing your work, then, in art as in math class, is an outer
sign of inner workings, a gesture towards the labor beneath a smooth
surface, unfolding the time hidden within instantaneous appearance. It
might be as simple as setting up a work bench in the gallery. See these tiles
sorted by color? I bet you can figure out how Garry used them to make
“Overcoat,” perhaps even estimate the amount of time it took.
Piece work then, by definition, is a unit-based activity. And while the
painter’s art is often continuous—brush strokes, even when visible, can
blend into one another—Garry’s paintings are just as often assemblages
composed of discrete units, pieces made of pieces. The units of the
“Overcoat” series are paper tiles, or shingles, or scales depending on how
you want to think of them. Garry mentions working a roofing job when he
was 17. We might think: shingled roof as overcoat. Or we might see scales,
so that the artwork becomes a kind of living skin, the word “Overcoat”
suggesting that we might try it on, swim in its logic for a moment.
The series’ original inspiration is an old magazine picture: a Denmark
salesman constructed a massive, multi-story outdoor coat rack, a kind of
abstract tiling of public space. In Garry’s series, overcoats have been
shrunken down to paper tiles, though Garry is still working on a largeenough
scale that the question of part versus whole remains. The entire
artwork becomes one large overcoat, even if the scalloped tiles, streaky
with paint, hold their own—each perfectly poised against its surrounding
colors.
5
Bordered by stripes that evoke longitude and latitude lines, each
“Overcoat” is its own topography. In this way, the piece conveys the
geographic methodology that pervades Garry’s work. Remember
geography? We learn about geography in grade school and then never
hear about it again. We instead talk of more specific phenomena like
geology, geopolitics, even geothermal energy. Are there still geographers?
(Yes.) The word roots (geo + graphy) translate literally as “earth-drawing,” a
practice that sounds archaic in our era of GPS and mapping software; it
would seem to have as much in common with art as with the sciences. For
Garry, this translation is quite literal: the earth itself draws, is itself a
drawing. The planet is a system of edges. At the most simple global view, it
sketches lines where land and water meet: coasts, river banks, lake rims.
Unlike earlier cartographers who set out to map a static God-given mass,
we know that these edges are in constant transformation through forces
such as erosion and plate tectonics. The earth is, to a great extent, selfmoving.
Nor is it an impassive medium for human extraction, but a
reactive complex of systems that warm, cool, flood, batter, collapse, erupt.
Only relatively recently have we gained a global picture of our dynamic
planet—we can see it from above and see it changing. We observe the earth
drawing itself. If our relationship to the earth has split into all the subdisciplines
mentioned above, perhaps geography, and the artist’s ability to
embody “earth drawing,” might be a way of bringing it all back together.
Relatedly, the “Plan-O-Gram” series is about the organization of human
life, about spatialized economic activity as life; that is, human dwelling.
The series is named after a diagram used in retail to map out a store’s
product displays. The bottom layer of each piece is a map, mostly
obscured by roughly painted rectangles in a loose grid pattern. Atop these,
Garry depicts illusionistic boxes that might suggest floating display shelves,
as if they’re reaching out from the painting to offer you something. What
are they trying to sell? Nothing, really; the boxes are empty save for
themselves. Yet this is not so much a comment on consumerism as a
treatment of the formalism of commerce. It’s about the shape of life under
modern economic conditions, vibrant even so.
Garry constructs his foreground out of non-skid road tape, painting it to
suggest three-dimensional boxes but much of the time refraining from fully
rendering them as such. Purposeful misalignments, missing corners, and
perspectively incorrect folds create moments that conspire against what is
still a general impression of depth. This plane of contrapuntal visual cues
eddies and warps around corners and edges, pulses with changing colors, a
complex yet accessible music. The “Plan-O-Gram” series is one of the
show’s best examples of Garry’s obsession with interplay between surface
and illusionistic representation.
6
We might think of each “Plan-O-Gram” as a highly abstracted cityscape,
the aesthetic equivalent of logistics for commercial activity. The word
“plan” can refer to steps to be taken in the future, or to a two-dimensional
diagram of an existing space. Garry’s “Plan-O-Grams” juggle these
definitions, hovering between a rational vision of an order-to-come and
the unruly shape of the present. Economics and city-planning are a bit like
that, too, messy mixtures of rationality, rules-of-thumb, anticipation,
reaction, competing interests, and the irrepressible improvisations of
human social life.
In each “Plan-O-Gram,” the background of map and the foreground of
boxes is mediated by the scratchy, colorful squares in the middle ground, as
if to suggest that this is the formal principle linking them. This middle
ground conjures chain-link fence, tiles, or city blocks, depending on your
mood. It negotiates between the bird’s-eye view of the map and the
human-eye (or road-side?) view of the boxes. These squares were actually
created unintentionally at first: they are the outlines formed by painting
the paper tiles for Garry’s “Overcoat” series. The residue of that activity
thus reveals the overcoat’s “plan,” whether any such plan was conscious for
Garry or not.
Grids, city blocks, shelves; city planning or retail logistics; it’s all life, the
human activity of working the planet into something habitable and
meaningful, negotiating edges, defining positive and negative space,
asserting who owns what, who gets to be where. The artwork isn’t saying
it’s all perfect or right. But there is here, as everywhere in Garry’s work, an
optimism of color, a relentlessly charming palette which balances itself
against the problems of existence. The non-skid tape gives your gaze
traction; like road lines, it guides and directs you, constructing space; like
retail shelving, it also catches the eye, enticing it. It compels you to stick
with life.
Garry, for all his experimentation with found material, is ever the fastidious
painter at heart. His investigation of materiality is always set against the
medium’s illusionist capabilities, its potential representational depths, the
painter’s art. Op art is one of his early influences. “Untitled,” from 1979, a
pixelated painting from a time before pixels had entered popular
consciousness, is an example of how the illusionistic geometry of Op art
and the algorithmic patterns of minimal art foreshadow digital space.
While the handmade “Untitled” is resolutely analogue, its creation of
warped depths purely through blocks of color and changing proportions
on a grid suggest that these artistic modes create a kind of precursor digital
space; the virtual within the material.
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With an exquisite eye for texture and mass, combined with an equal
aptitude for perspectival geometry, Garry thus harnesses a paradox:
surfaces that present as things-in-themselves while also leading us into
represented depth. Materials travel away from themselves (paper squares
become pixels, flat tape depicts a box) and, what amounts to the same
thing, representation heads back to its material building blocks (see Garry’s
altered photographs). It’s a physics where matter and representation are
one. Whatever is present also represents. Garry is a painter at heart, after
all.
Garry thus practices a deceptively easy elision between physical and
cultural material. “Close Up USA” is a perfect example of this meeting
point. Garry glues the pages of an issue of National Geographic together
into a single brick, chops the bricks into slabs, assembles a substrate out of
several such slabs, slathers them in oil paint, and carves a crude map of the
lower 48 states into the paint. At what point does the magazine transition
into a tectonic slab, or the indented oil paint into a national boundary?
Like this piece, our lives constantly shift between the thick and the
immaterial, printed page and slab of matter, immanent touch and satelliteeye
view.
This is why Garry’s abstract work and his collage practice are really part
of the same activity. Whether it’s photographs or paper tiles or any other
found object, it’s all just material to be worked with. These collages are
actually, as Garry calls them, altered photographs. They involve eclipse-like
anomalies, hoax-like fakes, and giant words embedded in the landscape
like the Hollywood sign. They reveal the constructedness of images and
the precariousness of how we view landscape.
Garry works almost exclusively with early National Geographic pages. At first
the fakery escapes—for a split second—your notice. You think Garry is
simply recontextualizing a found photo as a readymade—but, wait, this
tropical plant doesn’t live on alpine slopes, these mountains don’t belong at
the edge of this farmland, etc. Things escalate. A jagged slice of sky
darkens as if becoming a mountain range. Black-and-white lunar photos
disrupt pristine landscapes, like fake moon landings in reverse. Or, with a
drop of acrylic matte medium, Garry excises a small circle of ink from the
image and shifts it over slightly, exposing a crescent of raw white paper
beneath, like an eclipse. Emulsified in the matte medium, the ink forms a
raised glob that distorts the image within it as would a lens or drop of
water. These globs track gazes and trace orbital paths.
At the core of this work, as always with Western landscape art, is the
relationship between humans and the Earth, or more specifically with
whatever segment of the planet we can fit in our minds at a given time. We
construct that relationship through images, smoothing and naturalizing it.
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In Garry’s altered photographs, astronomical phenomena, remote biomes,
and political ideologies all come uncomfortably close to a patch of Earth
you thought you knew. The “Attention Fascists” series is the most overt
iteration of this activity. Overall, it’s a kind of de-geography that collapses
previously established distances, territories, and separation, putting oncehidden
edges into extreme contact with each other—leaving it up to you,
the viewer, to do the negotiating, to be the geographer.
If geography is how humans make sense of the Earth, then what about
animals? In “Parade” strips of colored duct tape cross each other and mass
as jagged polygons to form an abstracted elephant. It walks from right to
left, motion multiplying its legs across the piece’s wide aspect ratio. The
elephant’s “torso” extends indefinitely from end to end, in effect becoming
an endless trunk. Really, “Parade” does not so much depict the elephant as
act like one, mapping its movement from the inside. In greens, yellows,
pinks, and grays, its quadrilaterals and stripes also suggest a map, a
territory called, perhaps, elephant walking that the viewer could inhabit and,
eventually, become. Life in this elephantine territory would be all trunk, an
extension of your face snaking over the earth with thousands of flexible
muscles, amplifying smell, feeding, drinking, calling out: the elephant’s
union with the world.
To make “Parade,” Garry laid strips of tape on the floor of his studio, then
lifted them up all at once, their adhesive faces now caked in wood and
other studio debris, lending the appearance of earthy skin. As Garry points
out, one patch of debris even hovers over a trunk-like appendage like an
eye. In effect, the inside of the artwork—the plane once hidden between
tape and ground—has been exposed. The viewer becomes privy to its
inner workings. “Parade” conveys the earthiness of the elephant, its
geography; in fact it treats earth, elephant, and studio as one. The tape
becomes the artist’s trunk. Strong yet flexible, it senses, grasps, and lifts
everything it comes in contact with.
***
Brandan Griffin is the author of the poetry collections Four Concretures (Theaphora,
2024) and Impastoral (Omnidawn, 2022). He lives in Kansas City, MO, where he
teaches, writes about art, and co-runs the bookstore New Material Books.

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