LANCE RUTLEDGE, Nothing Allowed to Occur Here Under Any Circumstances, Whatsoever, Period.
Soloway Gallery is pleased to present Nothing Allowed to Occur Here Under Any Circumstances, Whatsoever, Period., a solo presentation of works by Lance Rutledge spanning 2015 to the present. Clipper ships, lunatic proclamations, snack-bar signs, and the mottled purple-gray-orange of a storm at sunset: Rutledge’s work refuses to separate word from image, instead producing an insistently eccentric hybrid form where handwriting, scribbles, color field, image, and figure are welded together in paint. Addressed to recipients unknown, his paintings are cobbled together from memory traces evoking handwritten lost pet posters taped to telephone poles and those seeking missing lovers or family members after disasters; missed connections, want ads, hand-painted signs, personals and the police blotter from the town paper; for-sale flyers posted on grocery store signboards and revenge drawings made by awkward teenagers. Before we know it, the paintings draw us into some petty quarrel about a neighbor’s herniated disc and the questionable giveaway at an appliance store; a conflicted list of grievances posted by a local crackpot and the boasts of a self-reflexive, perhaps triumphant, sign painter: THESE ARE MY LAST FOUR DOTS…. The works in Nothing Allowed to Occur Here Under Any Circumstances, Whatsoever, Period. bring Rutledge’s long-standing interests in language and humor together with gently luminescent modulating chroma to produce a tragi-comic ambiance, somehow at once tender and pointed.
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Lance Rutledge (is based in NYC. He received his BFA from Michigan State University in 1974. Notable past exhibitions include solo shows at White Columns (1986) and Colin de Land/American Fine Arts (1987); and group exhibitions at Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton NY; Islip Museum, Long Island; The Brooklyn Museum, Exit Art, Four Walls, the New Museum, and The Drawing Center, NYC. Rutledge is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock/Krasner Foundation, and NYFA.