PSTL Gallery

Daniel McGrath
What Pictures Want

March 5 - April 24, 2010

Opening Reception: Friday, March 5, 2010, 6pm-9pm

PSTL Gallery is pleased to present new work by local artist Daniel McGrath. The exhibition opens Friday, March 5th, with an opening that evening from 6 – 9pm. The exhibition will run through April 24.

What Pictures Want is an ongoing series of text based paintings based on W.J.T. Mitchell’s hypothesis that pictures must be considered living things that communicate and have desires, as outlined in his essay “What Do Pictures Want?” from 2005. These paintings' desires in short, are to trade places with the beholder turning him or her into an image for the gaze of the picture. The text is found in a variety of publications and books about art and reproduced with Helvetica font and house paint. A generic font and an anonymous value scale of black and white, both are nearly ubiquitous in our visual landscape today. Zeroing in on some of the more outrageous statements made in these books, each painting conveys a statement in the form of a dryly written vinyl didactic panel. Each statement has the verb tenses and nouns altered to convey the painting as narrator. The punctuation and text alignment is slightly askew in each painting, an indication that something is not quite right, perhaps suggesting that a copy editor has not cleared the statement or that the graphic designer is being slack.

Daniel McGrath received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from UCLA and his Master of Arts degree from the University of London - King’s College in 2005.

PSTL Gallery@Pace Framing
3842 Washington Blvd.
Saint Louis, MO 63108

314-531-4304
email: paceframing@yahoo.com

Upcoming Exhibition: Eden Harris
April 30-tba
Opening Reception: Friday, April 30, 2010, 6pm-9pm

Main Navigation