Edward Schexnayder / presentation
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Presentation by Edward Schexnayder
April 22, 2009 at 6 pm
Presentation:
Edward will be giving a presentation on his paintings followed by a personal overview of the arts in New York. He will begin with a brief overview of his work in graduate school to the present. He will also give a sketch of a project that he is working on during his residency. Following these remarks, Edward will discuss the current state of the arts in New York and his placement in it. Comments and questions are strongly encouraged.
Artist’s Statement:
Loose threads…
Painting as a paradox for the dialectic. It is both a negative, that is to say, nothing really, and a positive, or a becoming something.
…a kind of aimless drifting…
Engaging with, preserving, and invigorating my inheritance of folk art (associated primarily with my mother’s quilting and sewing) and painting (associated primarily with my father, an abstract painter). I want to use history to shape my work and historical materiality as its structure. Then, I want to paint into that historical material.
…almost perversely wrong or nonsensical in the way they’re laid out…
The Grand fiction of painting, with its historical implications and corruptions, as well as specific painterly problems are frequently revisited, analyzed, and partially remade as painted pictures under contemporary shifting conditions.
To keep on doing “reason in the grass and tears in the sky,” as Cezanne said of Poussin’s painting.
…in the manner of a disoriented gambler who stakes a vast amount on a random card…
Painting to produce pleasure and strangeness.
Through a quiet and slow testing of painting’s discursive potentials, I want to approach the irrational through the rational as a means to resist our current historical moment’s post-everything nihilism.
…for fun…
The imagination has no sense of the inappropriate.
…this is too serious a matter to not treat it as such.
(Note: this statement is a weaving together of parts from Jutta Koether’s “Artist Statement”, Gerhard Richter’s “Writings”, Philip Taffe’s “Statement”, and my own words.)
Edward Schexnayder was born in Gallup, New Mexico USA and briefly lived on the Navajo Indian Reservation. He was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the University of New Orleans where he received 2 bachelor’s degrees, one in studio painting and the other in philosophy. He trained under Professor James Richard in painting who was also the instructor to Peter Halley, the famous New York painter and present Director of Graduate Studies in Painting and Printmaking at Yale University. His philosophical studies were in the area of aesthetics under Doctor Frank Schalow, a noted scholar of Heidegger. Edward received his Master of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he studied under the painter Michael Brennan and the performance artist Ernesto Pujol. He recently participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program under the guidance of director Ron Clark.
Edward has exhibited widely in New York and in Brooklyn, such as Whitebox, PS122 Gallery, Cooper Union, and the Brooklyn Arts Council Gallery. He recently exhibited in “Four Continents” at the National Museum of Art Gallery in Gabrone, Botswana. He was invited to participate in the Third Guangzhou Triennial in Guangzhou, China. He was awarded a development grant from the Fractured Atlas group. Edward is currently a resident in Zagreb, Croatia through Art in General’s (New York) EERE program with the HDLU in Zagreb.
