SHAHEEN Modern and Contemporary Art is delighted to announce an exhibition of recent works on paper by 29 year-old Los Angeles based painter Faris McReynolds. Entitled Sight Unseen, this will be McReynolds' first one person gallery exhibition in the Midwest.
The fourteen works on paper that will comprise Faris McReynolds' upcoming exhibition at SHAHEEN are based on images that the artist has culled from 1970's film and television. Through extricating these carefully chosen source images from their original storylines; manipulating them through the same mechanisms and sensibility of filmmaking; and transforming them into painting through a combination of acrylic paint, watercolor, gouache and ink, McReynolds re-casts them, and employs them in telling a larger story about contemporary life and culture. The artist's attraction to film as a source of readymade imagery, and his specific working process have evolved from an increasing belief or realization that fiction often communicates a universal range of human experience and emotion with greater efficacy than the documentation of reality itself. McReynolds' works on paper both counterbalance and blur the lines between staged and intuitive; original and reproduced; familiar and unexpected; digital and analog; truth and fiction; and memory and imagination. The artist leaves the scenes and figures depicted in these works suspended in a strange state of potential / impending action or reaction.
Over the past two years Faris McReynolds' paintings and works on paper have appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Japan. In addition to his exhibition at SHAHEEN, the artist will have his first significant solo gallery exhibitions in New York (at Goff + Rosenthal) and Europe (at Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp) this year.