





Client: Gebert Contemporary
Location: Scottsdale, AZ, United States
Completion date: 2020
Artwork budget: $10,000
Project Team
Gallery Director
Bill Lykins
Gebert Contemporary
Painting and Sculpture
John Randall Nelson
Whonelson Studio
Overview
John Randall Nelson
a solo exhibition of new works.
About:
Nelson, as a nationally exhibited artist of over 3 decades, has a long-standing reputation for his honed development of urban-neo-folk icons.
Goals
Opening Reception: Thursday April 16th, 7-9pm
Exhibition Dates: April 2nd, 2020- June 1st, 2020
View a Virtual Exhibition @ http://whonelson.com/2018x/
Process
Nelson, as a nationally exhibited artist of over 3 decades, has a long-standing reputation for his honed development of urban-neo-folk icons.
Through the process of obliterating and burying layers of under-painting into near obscurity, Nelson transmutes his longtime lexicon of icons into a thick white noise that hums with text, collage and paint pours.
Additional Information
Both comic and menacing, smart and dumb, Nelson’s array of decorous paintings revel in materiality. The paintings are thick with poured pigment, saturated washes and worked with layers of drawing and collage. Bluntly rendered, the work is textured with ghostly pentimenti, the hint of submerged words bleeding through a milky layered ground. The intention to simultaneously “mean something” and “mean nothing at all” is the quixotic balancing act of Nelson’s work. The series includes a dozen paintings in varying scale and steel plate sculptures. All pieces are all multicolored, peculiar and charming. Upon closer inspection it becomes clear that while the works hold an aesthetic charm, they also whisper sardonically between one another.