ANDY CAHILL + NICK PAYNE + BILL SAYLOR + CLAYTON SCHIFF + JAMIE WILLIAMS + NIKI WILLIAMS: WAY OFF SOMEWHERE

Marvin Gardens is pleased to present Way Off Somewhere, curated by Jonathan DeDecker.
In this painting and drawing exhibition, six distinct voices coalesce into a curation of affective unity. DeDecker suggests that these images “might help lead us into a fantastically energized pictorial pursuit of the future, but just way off to the side somewhere.”

Shining through the aesthetic diversity on display in this exhibition, is a shared commitment to figurative work, with methods varying from fragmentation to a focus on symbol and myth. A dark and often darkly comic thread runs through this show, born possibly of the solitary mode in which these works were executed. Distanced from the rapid image cycles and production turnovers of the culture industry, here we see artists taking a slow dive into deeply intimate experimentations with visual language. In a world of 24-hour news cycles and fickle alliances with truth, there is something to be celebrated in the durational relation of material and image, body and implement. There is a sense of being in the world and yet inhabiting a different temporality, of being tightly wound and yet somehow adrift, of being “Way Off Somewhere.” Taking up such a location is not an abdication of the present but a sideways stance that critically gazes on the many times and places, visual histories and possible futures that swirl in the now.

Jonathan DeDecker is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has mounted solo exhibitions at Space 1026 in Philadelphia, PA and at Marvin Gardens, NY, and has most recently been featured in group shows at Current Space in Baltimore, MD, Columbia University, NY, and Antenna Gallery in New Orleans, LA. This is the second exhibition at Marvin Gardens curated by an artist who has shown with the gallery.