BAYNE PETERSON: Mantis Shrimp Eye
March 6 - April 4

The gallery is delighted to announce a solo exhibition of new dyed plywood sculptures by Bayne Peterson.  This is the artist's third solo exhibition with the gallery.  A full-color catalogue with an essay by Dominic Molon, Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art at the RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, accompanies the exhibition.  Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, March 6th from 6-8pm, in concert with the NADA New York Gallery Open’s Lower East Side/Chinatown neighborhood day.

Peterson's new sculptures continue his exploration of sculptural form and surface through the particular technique of hand-carving striated plywood.  Various traditions of craft and aspects of Modernist sculpture inspire Peterson's sculptural forms, which in turn provide the surface for complex, optical patterning.  In this body of work, Peterson continues a broader conversation of the relationship between sculpture and its base.  Solid and open cubes as well as irregular shapes that appear creased or elongated anchor an upper portion of sculpture that registers as gently mutable and organic.

The mantis shrimp, a crustacean characterized by its unique perceptual attributes, advanced optical hardware, and ability to communicate through color, speaks to ideas of perceptual openness and optical expansion that continue to be tenets of Peterson's practice.  These qualities appear visibly, in the artist's final sculptures, through dynamic relationships between form, color, and line. Repeated grids give way to dimensional slopes; openings within solid areas of wood include three-dimensional space as a formal element of sculpture.  As Molon writes,  "Peterson’s works exist within our lived space yet encourage us to see and think elsewhere—be it an oceanic wonderland, a synthesis of styles and sensibilities of the still somewhat recent past, or the inside of a crustacean’s eyeball—rather than immersing us within."

Bayne Peterson was born in Palo Alto, California in 1984, and lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.  Sculptures by Peterson are included in the collections of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, and the RISD Museum, Providence, RI, among others.  Group exhibitions include, "Circus: Bittman + Peterson," Practise, Chicago, IL, 2019, "Psychedelic Healing Center," Essex Flowers, New York, NY, 2019, "The Future of Craft Part 1: MAD Collects,” Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, 2018, “The International Hokuriku Kogei Summit,” Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art and Design, Toyama, Japan, nominated by Shannon R. Stratton, 2017, and “Abstraction in Art Since 1950: Modern and Contemporary Selections from the Collection,” RISD Museum, Providence, RI, 2016.  He will be included in a three-person exhibition curated by Laura Bickford at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin in the fall of 2020.