The World We Have Lost<\/em>, of recent xerography paintings, works on paper and concrete sculptures by Thomas Lail. The exhibition opens April 5 and will be Lail’s first show at the New York City gallery.<\/p>\nLail, a fine arts professor at Hudson Valley Community College, lives and works in New York City and Kinderhook. His work has been internationally exhibited in such prestigious venues as Gal\u00e9ria J\u00e1na Koniarka, Trnava, Slovakia; ArtCologne, Cologne, Germany; Economy Projects, London, UK;\u00a0 Gal\u00e9ria Cypri\u00e1na Majern\u00edka, Bratislava, Slovakia, Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX; Spaces, Cleveland, OH; White Columns, New York, NY. Masters & Pelavin represents Thomas Lail and his wife Tara Fracalossi.<\/p>\n
Focusing on the \u201cUtopian Dream,\u201d Lail employs image fragments sourced from communes of the 1960s and 1970s, Modernist structures and idealized communities to form the domes and maps of futurist\/architect Buckminster Fuller.\u00a0These images are typically presented as collages created from xerox copies. Like most xerography, if the object being copied is not flat, or the cover does not totally cover the object, the image is distorted in some way. The shifting of the object, the amount of light that reaches the image surface, the distance of the cover from the glass all affect the final image. By repeatedly reproducing these distorted reproductions with proper manipulation, Lail is able to create rather ghostly images.<\/p>\n
Lail\u2019s working process is informed by a constant gathering, collecting, sorting and assembling, the result of which is then recreated, interpreted and incorporated. While his methodology is most evident in collages and works on paper, which provides him with a template for working out ideas, it has recently been applied in his new xerography paintings. Layered grounds are assembled from an accumulation of smaller torn or cut xerox\u2019s that have been mounted to canvas. The subject, in most cases a Utopian icon, inevitably records the bumpy topography of the accumulation below. Furthering this concept of layering, Lail repeats his subjects, thus creating a loose series — a multi-referential catalogue of pictures, all slightly different, of the same thing.<\/p>\n
In The World We Have Lost<\/em>, titled after the path breaking and highly-popular publication of Peter Laslett, Lail continues to examine history and political thought through a series of variations centered on Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map — a projection of a world map onto the surface of a polyhedron. Fuller intended the map to be unfolded indifferent ways to emphasize different aspects of the world. Peeling the triangular faces of the icosahedron apart in one way results in an icosahedral net that shows an almost contiguous land mass comprising all of earth’s continents — not groups of continents divided by oceans. Peeling the solid apart in a different way presents a view of the world dominated by connected oceans surrounded by land.<\/p>\nVariations of Fuller’s Dymaxion Map are directly depicted in each of Lail\u2019s xerography paintings and works on paper, which are created from fragments of distorted reproductions of communes, “drop cities,” High Modernist housing projects, Goya’s “Disasters of War” and Courbet’s “Burial at Ornans.” From afar, this work achieves Fuller’s goal of showing\u00a0\u201ca precise means for seeing the world from the dynamic, cosmic and comprehensive viewpoint.\u201d However, upon closer examination, figures found within the assembled imagery begin to develop relationships and interactions reminiscent of The Soviet writer Ivan Efremov\u2019s utopia, \u201cAndromeda\u201d (1957), in which a united humanity communicates with a galaxy-wide Great Circle in order to develop its culture within a single social framework. By also presenting cast concrete representations of the Dymaxion Map\u2019s triangle edges, within the physical space, Lail allows viewers to enter in to the\u00a0Great Circle with his subjects.<\/p>\n
The World We Have Lost will be on view at Masters & Pelavin through May 19. Visit the gallery’s website<\/a> for more information.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Published:<\/strong>\u00a0Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:30:21 +0000 by\u00a0d.gardner<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Untitled #318 (Map Edge), collage on canvas, 50″x80,” 2011 Masters & Pelavin is pleased to announce an exhibition,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2086,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accolades"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/thomlail.jpg\" "\\"thomlail\\"")
<\/p>\n