Sep 11, 2015
Poem88
Westside Provisions District
1170 Howell Mill Road, Suite 106
Atlanta, GA 30318

On Friday, September 11, Poem 88 will host the second solo exhibition, Decals, by Atlanta artist Brendan Carroll, An MFA graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, Carroll has become a mainstay in Atlanta’s burgeoning community of young painters. He is a co-organizer of SeekATL, an artist-led critique program.

His new body of work titled Decals references a sticker once placed on home windows to help firefighters identify children’s bedrooms in an emergency. Ultimately, the decals were dispensed with for their apparent redundancy: firefighters would check every room in a burning house regardless of the decal.

Carroll’s paintings, made by layering acrylic paint and rubber cement, have hyper-energized, richly-colored surfaces. The figure (from the decal) of the firefighter is sometimes readily visible and at other times it dissolves away through his aggressive process. Likewise, the words “Tot Finder” come in and out of view. In this way, the paintings address tradition and modernity and the collision of these two ideas either through obscuration or the surprising pentimenti as well as through the clash of our romantic hero-worship with our experience of reality. Finally, this body of work marks Carroll’s first experiments with text as a formal element.

Opening reception: Fri, Sep 11 from 6-8pm

Free parking is available in the White Provision parking deck.  Exhibit sponsored by Campari.

pictured: Brendan Carroll, Decal 11, 2014, acrylic and rubber cement on canvas, 60” x 48”

http://poem88.net