Our exhibition program begins with a two-person exhibition of paintings by Daniel Davidson and Miles Shelton. This exhibit will feature two distinct series of paintings that mine the language, costume and iconography of commerce and work culture.

 

Daniel Davidson‘s Out Of Office (O.O.O.) paintings are a direct commentary of the glib corporate newspeak often used within the geometry of closed walls - digital and cubical alike. Initially started as iPhone drawings done while commuting to his corporate job, these small gestures graduated to paintings on common shirting fabric, a textile that mimics a painter’s grid. Davidson’s humorous tongue-in-cheek paintings raise questions about the nature of corporate culture, its effects on mental health, and the blurred lines between professional and personal life.

 

Miles Shelton engages with work culture in a different arena, as his Instagram handle of foodtownUSA may suggest. From a personal collection of price tags and common labels from around the globe, Shelton explores the relationship between art, commerce and value in the pedestrian realm. The paintings are exercises in perfection about imperfection, presenting in precise detail, skewed and distorted images of prices, numbers and descriptive labels to things we are familiar with, yet remain unseen.  

 

Both Davidson’s phrases and Shelton’s numbers operate in a familiar day to day vocabulary and play with the abstraction of language and workplace topics that ask: What is really being said? What are we paying for? What are we getting, or for that matter, what are we giving up?

 

Davidson and Shelton remind us that art is work. A great majority of that work is seeing what others perceive as ordinary and asking questions about what has become “familiar.” The rest of that work is dragging what is found out into the light of day and doing the work of painting.