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​SPREADING

The images of Gary Faigin’s most recent series, Concentrated, meld the classic stylings of still life painting with contemporary components, including twists on traditonal subjects like fruit (portrayed as exploded, bursting, crushed) and vases and vessels smashed to bits. In them, objects of everyday use and ritual are pitted against the psychological aspects attributed to them, whether consciously or not.

“In these paintings, the foreground objects have arranged themselves into complicated and symmetrical domestic totems,” Faigin says, “a sort of shrine to home comforts–with purposeful contradictions in space. How can so many things be in the same place at the same time?”

Faigin’s “Spreading” is on view at V2 Arts Center as part of American Painting Today through Dec. 18.

​GARY FAIGIN

Gary Faigin studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the Art Students League of New York, and the Ecole nationale superieure des beaux-arts in Paris. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Frye Art Museum and Woodside/Braseth Gallery in Seattle and the Coos Art Museum in Coos Bay, Oregon, as well as group shows at galleries in Santa Fe, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, and New York. His work has been included in a number of survey and instructional books and has ben highlighted in newspaper and journal articles. His works are in the collections of the City of New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, as well as sevral corporate collections, incluing Boeing Corporation, Immunex, and Merrill Lynch. Faigin is the co-founder, Artistic Director, and a senior instructor at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle. He is also an art critic for KUOW.

Gary Faigin’s imagery is derived from conventions of traditional still lifes and mass media billboards that, at first glance, seem easily accessible. Upon further contemplation, however, more complex possibilities arise: things quietly fly apart or explode, scale expands in significance, pictures become incorporated into other pictures, signage translates into riddles, and the boundaries between nature and artifice are called into question.​