Continuing through February 12, 2011
Dematerialization has a succinct and precise meaning in the vaporized surfaces of Jeff Zilm's canvases. His is a strain of conceptualist evanescence that is highly material in its rudiment - a matter of celluloid disintegrated into acrylic emulsion. Zilm's "The House with Closed Shutters" is a sixty-inch by sixty-inch square canvas with a light gray mist of paint blown onto its surface. The gray tone is a result of film particulate mixed with the paint. Creating what the artist calls a "light peak," there is a strip of white canvas on the left edge.
The darker hue of gray that describes the surface of "Saps at Sea," a larger rectangular canvas, tells of a heavier extraction of sound and image data, and that Zilm dissolved a different film into that batch of paint. In this body of work, Zilm has worked with the movies of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and DW Griffith, creating haunting representations of New German Cinema and silent Hollywood in a tour de force of conceptualist painting.
Marty Walker Gallery