MAY 8-25 TREVOR WHEATLEY: “A RETURN WHERE”

Trevor Wheatley – A Return Where

Cataloguing an ever-growing body of paintings, sculptures, and large scale, site-specific graphic installations, A Return Where provides visual evidence of Trevor Wheatley’s developing interest in the place and nature of logos and other equally ubiquitous forms of pop iconography. By exposing recognizable graphic language to unlikely material and environmental possibilities – say, a wooden, billboard-sized Nike Swoosh installed in a horse field or the leaping Air Jordan silhouette sprayed onto the side of a highway overpass – Wheatley’s work questions whether such images may be decolonized in their roles as corporate metonyms and reduced to pure image when presented in isolated, commercially futile settings. By imposing these graphic one-liners on untouched environments, Wheatley attempts to both critique the place of advertisement in the public sphere and construct a hypothetical space in which such commercially evocative symbols might be re-coded or even neutralized in their initial function as corporate signifiers.

While Wheatley’s work ultimately reveals the extent to which advertisement remains an end in itself, as the graphic language at play maintains its “corporate identity” despite the fact it is not being used to promote any goods, what this process equally suggests is that even in their ubiquity such symbols remain entirely pliable. Through repeated use and visual reconfiguration that is increasingly moving towards abstraction, logos such as the Swoosh, the Air Jordan silhouette, and the Y2K-era “Super S” come to take on an added function as a form of visual shorthand for Wheatley himself. As he returns to these installation sites to re-document them as they age over time – a process recalled in the exhibition title A Return Where – their structural and material degeneration will powerfully serve to recall the mutability of such prominent symbols and how our associations with them are open to change dependent upon time and place.

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Join us this May to experience Trevor Wheatley’s newest collection of text based artwork as he transforms the gallery with his unique installation work! You may recognize his style from the massive mural found in our backyard here at #Hashtag Gallery, and if you don’t, you’ll have to come see that as well!

You can also find a couple of Trevor’s pieces at our LOVE ART FAIR booth May 7-11.

Show Runs May 8-25
FREE