Chris Domenick
Plumb
January 19 - February 24, 2019
Opening reception:
Saturday, January 19, 7—10pm

After winter, the paintbrushes go crazy. More layers of pink; it’s hard to tell if it’s the same
color as before, if the paint got duller in the can or on the wall. Over time, all these temporary
fixes stick together and make something ugly, but that works, and is also kind of pretty too.

In the house, what’s most precious is kept behind glass, away from dust and moths. It’s no good having holes in your sweater.

It takes a lot of work to keep the outside out and the inside in, and sometimes, to keep track of which is which. Eventually, they get to each other. It starts with cracks in the molding, next thing you know there are birds flying around in your living room.

We tend to the wallpaper, pour vinegar in the drains and shim up the furniture as it sinks deeper into the floor.

In the kitchen, I thumb through a cookbook on preparing stingray and burn a candle that smells like the ocean. We’re landlocked here, but fantasy is a universal affliction.

From the window, the sun is setting across an open field. A deer jumps over the rose bush.
I wish, somehow, it had meaning.

~~~

For Plumb, Domenick has created works that utilize his two-decade-long interest in drawing (and mark-making, more generally) as well as his ongoing preoccupation with display apparatuses and bonded materials (leather, laminate, flocking, plywood).

In previous works, the artist referred to deteriorating suburban landscapes, post-modern architecture, a la Robert Venturi, and the luxury interiors of art collectors, for source material. Here, his formal lexicon, which vacillates between signs in the landscape and signifiers in the home, extends to the rustic setting in Western Massachusetts where he currently resides. His materials, more embodied than symbolic, are disjointed and rejointed, distorted and then resolved, through haptic problem solving. A piece of laminate, cut into a circle, hovers like a massive floppy disc—useless—in the center of the frame; a vitrine is planned but left in the shape of the log it was cut from; the large and delicate hand-made frames are stained, their grains left visible; and bright yellow pencil marks are dirtied with the grey of graphite—like the morning light behind low lying clouds in the valley where he lives.

Plumb, comprised of 3 large-scale works, comes on the heels of Domenick’s recent show The Porch The Open at 14A in Hamburg. This work is a poetic, thematic, and visual continuation of the smaller series of works he created for that show.

Chris Domenick (b. 1982, Philadelphia) received an MFA from Hunter College and has participated in residencies including The Shandaken Project, The Sharpe-Walentas Space Program (NY), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Recess Activities (NY), among others. Recent projects include The Porch The Open at 14a, Hamburg, DE, Your Shell Is In the Unending, (in collaboration with Em Rooney) at The Beeler Gallery in Columbus, OH, Particulate Paper Records of Time in Cabinet Magazine and 5 O D A Y S at MASSMoCA. He has been included in exhibitions at The Queens Museum, Canada Gallery, The Vanity East, MOMA, Essex Flowers, Situations, Torrance Shipman, Regina Rex, and Room East, among others.