Big Red & Shiny: A Dialogue on Distortion: Graham McDougal and Bayne Peterson
January 22, 2018
Description
January 22, 2018
With its walls hung with Graham McDougal’s dizzying prints, and pedestals scattered across the floor with Bayne Peterson’s undulating sculptures perched atop them, Providence College’s Hunt-Cavanaugh Gallery takes on the feeling of a television set between channels, a physical manifestation of the vibrating static and whirring buzz. With the exception of a pair of large knot-shaped sculptures and a print depicting a monochrome gallery space, the works in A Dialogue on Distortion, curated by Jamilee Lacy, are all abstract. The linear compositions of McDougal’s prints are mirrored in the plywood from which Peterson has carved his amorphous sculptures. McDougal’s layered digital and screen prints and wood blacks remind me of the refraction that happens when you take a digital photo of a computer screen, the image distorted with water stain-like pixelation. Peterson’s sculptures share this quality. They seem to be organic forms created by digital means as if he had taken a 3D scan of a lava lamp.
