Paintings of the Vernacular

Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present Brendan Lott: Paintings of the Vernacular. Lott's paintings begin not in the studio but online — their subjects are amateur snapshots culled anonymously from peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, the cyber-debris that the widespread use of digital photography has cultivated, yielding a surplus of images from which to choose and transform. File sharing, for Lott, is a new form of community: one defined not by friendship or intimacy or even proximity, but by the global exchange of anonymous information.

That anonymity lets Lott overcome the power relationship between artist and subject by removing himself from the act of "taking" the picture — a remove that, paradoxically, yields portrayals of genuine intimacy. His found images move between adolescent sexuality, deeply personal self-portraiture, and quotidian surrealism; their charge is sharpened by titles drawn from popular music and the Bible, lending associations as profane as they are loving.

The paintings' very production reflects the world Lott lives in. He emails each chosen snapshot to professional painters in China, who reproduce it in a highly realistic oil-on-canvas style and ship the finished canvas back — a parallel practice of removed creation that mirrors the physically isolating networks the images come from, where relationships are founded not on knowing but on the act of looking.

Brendan Lott received his MFA from Stanford University in 2006 and his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. His work has been collected by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the E. Eric and Elizabeth D. Johnson Fellowship in Studio Art (2004–2006) and the Murphy & Cadogan Fellowship in the Fine Arts (2005). In 2008 he presented a solo exhibition, Memories I'll Never Have, at the San Jose Museum of Contemporary Art.