On view January 6 through February 10. An opening reception for All at Once will take place on Saturday, January 6, 2018, from 6:30-8:30 p.m. and a conversation with the artist will take place at 5:30 p.m.
For the traveler of today, smartphones have become the ultimate companion. Replacing the paper map, Google Maps will give voice instructions on how to get from point A to point B. In place of the point-and-shoot camera, iPhones and Androids capture high-definition photographs that can be shared instantly to multiple social networking platforms, letting one share up-to-the-moment travel updates with friends and family. Visiting any landmark today, the tourist with smartphone in hand has become a familiar icon.
This modern notion of traveling serves as the impetus for Arden Bendler Browning’s upcoming solo exhibition of paintings titled All at Once, the artist’s first with Galleri Urbane. Having recently embarked on a monumental 7,000-mile road trip with her family, the artist created a visual diary of the trek, taking photographs on her phone and capturing sketches of the moving and evolving landscape from the seat of her vehicle. Back in the studio, the endless number of images produced became the source material for the series of paintings. The forms of cities, towns, plains, glaciers, and hot springs are distorted as they are loosely painted in overlapping layers of vibrant color.
The intensely layered compositions reflect the contemporary obsession of being everywhere at once as made evident in society’s obsessive documentation and sharing of everyday moments with a digital device. Scrolling through our newsfeeds, photos taken and shared from all over the world are compiled and compressed into one place behind glass screens. Bendler Browning captures this phenomenon by adapting the gestural energy of mid-20th century abstract painting and transforming it with 21st century materials like Flashe paint and acrylic gouache. These materials provide the work with a matte, chalky finish that allows its multiplicity of layers to exist as one, flattened image to be experienced all at once. Like a blurred landscape viewed from a moving car window, or the swipe of images across a screen, Bendler Browning reconfigures the familiar and produces something new and unexpected that exists somewhere between the real and the virtual.
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