Press release

Baldwin Gallery is pleased to announce its third show with Tony Oursler an internationally acclaimed video-sculptor. In recent years, Oursler’s work has seen a vivid revival of his interest in painting and drawing, and in the new wall mounted video pieces there is a textural focus, that seeks to seamlessly subsume the video in the paint, swirling the two in mixed media. The current show comprises two elements. The first, are Rorschach portraits: like psychic hunting trophies, they each present an animalian butterfly-collection funhouse reflection of a sputtering subconscious; self-aware machines slouching (seasonally) towards Bethlehem, ready to be born. The balance of the show continues Oursler’s exploration of the magical seduction of the human gaze, this time peering forward from neural network derived patterns in facial recognition algorithm. Some whisper mystical fortune teller secrets, but the surfaces of the works are bright and painterly, exploring surface, texture, and mark-making that drifts in and out of focus, in line erasing dialogue, with the video around them. Since the mid-1970s, Oursler has been a pioneer in new media, and proponent of A.I. starpower. Oursler is widely considered one of the most significant leaders in the field of video art.

Oursler was born in New York City in 1957 and grew up in Nyack on the Hudson. Oursler exhibited at the Aspen Art Museum in 1997. He has collaborated with Constance DeJong, Tony Conrad, David Bowie, Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth, Joe Gibbons, Rem Koolhaas and Stephen Vitiello and was part of the musical and performance group, Poetics, with fellow CalArt students Mike Kelley and John Miller. He is widely collected by museums and institutions worldwide and currently works out of New York City.

Baldwin Gallery is also delighted to announce a third show with artist Marc Swanson. Swanson uses diverse materials and creates works in varying media but is perhaps best known for his crystal-covered deer head sculptures and antler pieces. Swanson juxtaposes both ‘high’ and ‘low’ materials in order to explore the physical and spiritual duality inherent in his experience of masculinity.

Raised in New England, Swanson moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s and began creating his pieces as a way to investigate his personal history. Swanson later went on to receive his MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 2004, and also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Skowhegan, Maine, in 2000. Swanson has held solo exhibitions in many major cities, including San Francisco, Chicago and New York and his work has been included in group exhibitions at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Miami Art Museum and the Saatchi Gallery, London.

Images are available upon request. Please call 970.920.9797 for further information.