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130
ft High, 65 thou Gal, 1/2 Mile Deep
William Steiger
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May
6, 2002 - August 24, 2002
Opening Reception: Monday, May 6, 2002, 5:00 - 8:00
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William Steiger paintings allow his imagination and
our collective memory merge to shape "reality."
Steiger’s subjects are bridges, towering structures,
and flying machines from the first half of the 20th
century. He often paints these magnificent constructions
that once epitomized progress and technology, as well
as landscapes from an aerial perspective. Parachute
Drop (2002) elicits the viewer’s awe with the grandeur
of its physical presence and the dazzling beauty of
an intricate iron web rendered in an exaggerated upward
perspective. However, Steiger’s revisit to Precisionism
does not replicate Charles Sheeler’s celebration
of the industrial sublime. Instead, he willfully guides
the viewer to what has become peripheral in today’s
American consciousness. His paintings are meditations
on the remnants of technology not without irony or sentiment
over lost innocence.
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| Tunnel (2000-2001)
is a line-rendered geometry that deceptively resembles
digital imaging. While Steiger’s emphasis on line
and stoic color scheme makes a crisp realism, it often
lapses into abstraction with his idiosyncratic formal
reduction: partially abbreviated contour-lines confuse
the spatial depth of the picture plane in Oil Derrick
(2002); ghostly traces of reworkings remain visible on
the canvas in Crane (2002). Steiger’s pictorial obliteration
of lines and planes is a system that defies a clear-cut
literalness and asserts the subject through memory. |
Steiger’s
paintings never suggest the presence of a living soul
and the skies are ascetically rendered like a bright vacuum.
As a result, many of the objects in his depiction appear
seductively anthropomorphic--as if they are portraits
rather than landscapes about human aspirations and the
idealism of the modern era. Steiger’s industrial
relics do not exist to evoke a sense of nostalgia about
heroic modernity, but to signal our shifting perception
on the iconic visions of Americana now and then.
Hitomi Iwasaki, Associate Curator
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About the Artist
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William
Steiger received his B.A. from University of California,
Santa Cruz, CA (1984) and an M.F.A. from Yale University
School of Art, New Haven, CT (1989). He is a recipient
of Art in Embassies Program Award (1995) and the Elizabeth
Greenshields Foundation Award (1990). His recent one-person
exhibitions include Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, GA (2002),
Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York, NY (2000), and Hackett-Freeman
Gallery, San Francisco, CA (1999). His work was also shown
in numerous group exhibitions that include: Stark Narratives,
Gallery Korea, New York, NY (2000), Relocating Landscape:
East and West, Caldwell College, Caldwell, NJ (1997),
and New York Selections, Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo,
NY (1995). A solo exhibition at Rudolph Projects, Houston,
TX is forthcoming. William Steiger was born in 1962, Summit,
New Jersey, and currently lives and works in New York
City.
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