Terminal Sunset | A collaborative installation by Damien Gilley and Robert Minervini
March 6–26, 2014 | Littman Gallery
Reception: Thursday, Mar 6, 2014 | 5–8pm
The Littman Gallery presents a collaborative two-person exhibition by artists Damien Gilley and Robert Minervini. The exhibition titled Terminal Sunset is a sweeping installation of wall works that encompass the Littman gallery space.
The artists create a duplicitous mapping of the gallery itself. Responding to the boundary as a perceptual activity, the gallery walls both exist and disappear, comfortable in its state as both a painting and a structure. Both artist’s’ preoccupation with illusions and allusions to depth as both flat and expansive are paramount in the show. The works vacillate between trompe-l’oeil and graphic space, presenting the viewer an interface that references pictorial tradition and computer-aided drafting. The gallery manifests as a self-referential entity, presenting an exhibition while being in one. The site, in a state of deconstruction, reinforces its physicality through elements that also serve to erase and recreate a sense of an external landscape. It is a divide that establishes indeterminate structures as a foundation of space that ultimately replaces the existing outside world.
Robert Minervini received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and his BFA from Tyler School of Art. He has exhibited nationally including a solo show with Electric Works, Marine Contemporary, Eleanor Harwood Gallery, a two person exhibition with Johansson Projects, and group exhibitions at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 941 Geary, The Brooklyn Historical Society, and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. He was nominated for a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant and has been awarded the Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship by the San Francisco Foundation, the Edwin Austin Abbey Mural Fellowship by the National Academy of Fine Art, and the Carmela Corso Scholarship by Tyler School of Art. His work has been published in Beautiful Decay Magazine, New American Paintings No. 91, and “Mural Art: Large Scale Art from Walls Around the World.”
Damien Gilley is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator in Portland, Oregon. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Tetem Kunstruimte (Enschede, Netherlands), EastWestProject (Berlin, DE), Suyama Space (Seattle), Las Vegas Art Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), Arthouse (Austin), the Art Museum of South Texas (Corpus Christi), and in Portland at Rocksbox, Linfield College, Wieden+Kennedy, the American Institute of Architects, the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and the Portland 2010 Biennial, among others. His work has been reviewed by Artforum.com, the Oregonian, Las Vegas Review Journal, the Austin Chronicle, Frame magazine, and New American Paintings.