NATHAN REDWOOD by Shannon Stratton

40000, Chicago IL September 7 - October 6, 2007

Nathan Redwood's "wheres my ship" is his second solo show at 40000 in Chicago. Primarily known as a painter, Redwood has recently been engaged in what one might call junkhouse gothic: dark landscapes that seem post-apocalyptic, with janky two-by-four structures, rafts, figures, and foliage.

Redwood tightens up a kind of Guston-esque, disembodied cartoonishness and melds it with an almost watercolorist style of handling liquefied acrylic, pushing it around in wide scribbles to build up a ground of disturbing intestinal clouds and drooping, fecal earth. In these putrid paintings, bodies appear to be made from pieces of timber, buckets, and springs, inundated by fluids shooting up from under the earth, as if to signify the polluted state of mind, country, and environment that lies just beneath the surface.

This latest outpouring, however, breaks through to a different dimension. Part sculptural installation and part nautical cabinet of wonder, he ship in question was constructed on-site from found materials scavenged from around Chicago (two-by-fours, tiles, shingles, shutters, broomsticks, furniture pieces, a chandelier, and so forth), effectively replicating in 3-D the cruddy bric-a-brac depicted in his paintings. The result is a charming boat or giant playpen that invites viewers to climb on-board and clamber about, where, if they're lucky, they'll also discover three petite, Olitiskian canvases of maritime theme (Muddy Waters, Wood Planks, and Blue Sky (all 2007)).

Rather like its funky spelling, Redwood's "wheres my ship" slips and slides between being a fun stunt and fine art, between being a question and a statement of fact, choosing instead just to be. This strategy of allowing objects to speak for themselves -- namely, the wisdom of the "sort of" - dogs a great deal of the heavily aestheticized young art devoted to found objects and the rest of the hipster flotsam and jetsam that accompanies Western lifestyle today. But it is from this shabby-chic vantage point that perhaps the peccadilloes girding Redwood's craft can ultimately be redeemed. Given his usual apocalyptic subject matater, and if a ship is indeed a symbol of escajpe, one can only imagine that this un-seaworthy, flat-bottomed, and overal leaky affair is a "sort of" argument for getting the hell out of painting. Just as this dysfunctional ship might wonder what star to hitch itself to, answering that question in the same breath via threadbare wreckage is a style that sooner or later will sink.

While I have a deep appreciation for Redwood's paintings and the emotional timbre they habitually strike, "wheres my ship" threatens to be lost to seeing. Although a beautiful patchwork of found detritus, one longs for the unerring tensioin of his earliler canvases. But perhaps he's also saying that it may be worth trying again, loosening up the current "whatever" style of painting and pushing farther into the wild, entropic territory that Redwood evokes so well from behind the acrylic veil.