Kerry Schuss Gallery

Press Release

Chronologically and geographically "Vagabond" covers eight years of rambling, exploring, and wandering in the service of seeing what's out there. Taking notice of the unnoticed, the abandoned, the ignored, common places imbued with an indefinable allure and certain strands of loveliness. From the East Coast to western deserts what's depicted are the surroundings that define us, the world we have made. The built and semi-natural environment of contemporary rural, urban, and exurban landscapes populated by edifices and structures in use or neglected to the point of ruin. Empty pools, a Blinky Palermoesque orange, black, blue, and grey semi trailer parked on Warsoff Place in Brooklyn, the Suncor oil refinery near the Denver airport, quite a few Gowanus Canal vistas, the High Line back when it was the West Side Line, and decrepit boats in Southport, North Carolina. A culvert hard by the 10 freeway in Tucson at the golden hour, patio furniture encountered during an afternoon break on the northern shores of Lake Erie, and a 1960s International Style office building in Great Bend, Pennsylvania, along with other quiet moments of poetic, serene vacancy.

Metal and leaves, concrete and plastic, trees and trains, scrap heaps and decaying drive-ins, parking lots and telephone wires, luminescent polluted water and cranes, bridges, overgrown tennis courts, and public housing in the distance, Everything is something as the most ordinary objects and prospects are saturated with detail and nuance. Things, places, views. Taken between 2009 and the present, the photographs on which these paintings are based are from travels around North America. They are not ends in themselves but tools for engaging in a wholly different, time-consuming, satisfying endeavor - that of painting. The photographs are jumping-off places for diving deeper through concentrated physical and mental effort to arrive at a personally consequential artifact owing all and strangely not much to the source material. Copying to rebel and revel in the freedom to reject verisimilitude in search of sensual meditation, wrestling with the medium because without that resistance there is no meaningful fulfillment.
- Jocko Weyland