Exhibition Statement
Decisive Gesture Towards Uncertain Outcomes pairs the work of Mark Banks, Brian Petrone and Ryan Standfest who each address infrastructure, the built landscape and its failings. Standfest’s paintings, drawings and prints approach these shadows of industry as unheroic; highlighting vulnerability and uncertainty rather than the ideal and monumental. Standfest’s work uses humor and the absurd to build a visual language in quiet conflict. In Of Phantom Appendages and Other Romantic Longings n.1 & 2 both structures and figures are bisected into disfunction, creating amputees of both the worker and the system.

Bank’s series of oil paintings In the Fields of Rotting Giants address the ruins of industrial sites along the southern tip of Lake Michigan that have permanently scarred the landscape to the molecular level. Several of Bank’s paintings address details of these spaces that serve as portraits of a larger system of extraction, pollution, and exploitation. In Study of Steel, he uses corrosion as a means of image making, which simultaneously will slowly break down his subject matter. Brian Petrone, an architect by trade, employs building materials to create sculptural work that references both the built world and environment that it impacts. His small scale works in Decisive Gestures Towards Uncertain Outcomes approach bricks and limestone with a collaborative reverence and create vignettes that consider larger scale implications with titles referencing Tectonics and Icebergs.

Artists:

Mark Banks is an oil painter and experimental media artist based in Chicago. His work is engaged with the perils of climate collapse, the traumatic residues of historical violence, and possibilities of radical transformation. Disavowing the idea that art is merely a system of passive representation, he uses his work in an effort to forcibly shake the interiority of everyday experience. Art is deployed here as a means of rupture and confrontation, as a radical practice of play and transgression.

Brian Petrone is an architect and artist who lives in Chicago. His practice explores the nature of place and the ways in which people mark the earth. Mr. Petrone’s studio work includes sculptural paintings that grow from the two-dimensional plane. He also creates site-specific installations that delve into the history of the people and the site in which they are created.
Ryan Standfest is an artist and publisher who lives and works in Detroit, Michigan. He has exhibited at the Simone DeSousa Gallery (now Matéria, Detroit), which also published a monograph on his work in 2020, Wasserman Projects (Detroit), Western Exhibitions (Chicago), The Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, among others. In 2010, Standfest founded the small publishing house Rotland Press, for which he has edited a collection of comic strips by artist and filmmaker David Lynch, two volumes of political prints by Sue Coe, and a collection of early satirical cartoons by Swiss artist H.R. Giger. As an arts writer, he has authored arts criticism and essays, appearing in numerous art and culture journals. Standfest contributed a chapter to the book Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance, edited by Elliott H. King and Abigail Susik (Penn State University Press, 2022). He has been an artist-in-residence at the Jentel Foundation (Banner, WY), the Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska City, NE), and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Amherst, VA). His work has been written about in Art in America, FRIEZE, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, and PRINT. Standfest earned an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa in Iowa City and a BFA in Printmaking and Drawing from Wayne State University in Detroit. He is an Assistant Professor of Art in the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Oakland University, Rochester, MI.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Albany Park, Brian Petrone, Decisive Gesture Towards Uncertain Outcome, Mark Banks, NEIU Fine Art Center Gallery, RYAN STANDFEST