Robert Wallace “Checklist”

Be-Kyoto

This event has ended.

Be-kyoto is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Kyoto-based American artist Robert Wallace. This is his second solo show with the gallery.
Wallace’s unique mixed-media exhibition will join the ground floor of the mezzanine floor of this historic 200-year-old machiya (townhouse). Visitors are invited to become participants by removing a printed Checklist from the walls thereby changing the exhibition slightly each day.
A Checklist is an unusual literary form created by American artist Brian Moran sometime in the mid-1990s. Wallace describes it as ephemera, a vain and futile attempt to capture in writing the tiny details of ones life as they speed by too quickly and in too great a volume to ever grasp.
He has endeavored with this exhibition to express visually, in paint and collage, what a Checklist is. Embedded in each painting are Checklists written since he arrived in Japan almost three years ago. Sometimes the words are visible and sometimes they are not; sometimes they float on the surface, sometimes they are buried deep within the painting, just as thoughts rise and sink in our head, and the vast amount of information we process is retained or discarded. The paintings are united by materials and color palette, but lack a cohesive style, much the same way Checklists are all made up of words, but have no relation to each other. It is the complete randomness of the mind and our lives he is inviting the viewer to consider.