Oliver Vernon

“Counterpoint”

February 18, 2023 – May 6, 2023
627 E Main St, Grass Valley, CA 95945

The Chambers Project Announces The Opening of Oliver Vernon’s “Counterpoint” Solo Show

Grass Valley, CA, February 18, 2023The Chambers Project is very excited to announce its first Oliver Vernon solo show since opening its doors.

Oliver Vernon is a Grass Valley-based artist whose work is grounded in his commitment to exploring form and movement, and their relationship with the psychological states that create the nature of reality. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is featured in numerous collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“Counterpoint,” a collection of paintings, drawings, and driftwood sculptures, is a testament to the artist’s devotion to abstract expressionism and his dexterity in portraying the unportrayable.

“It’s not about making something; it’s about the feeling of doing it,” Vernon adds. “It’s like a pure expression of some transcendental space.”

As an artist, Vernon concerns himself with penetrating the flat surface of the canvas and providing the viewer with a full range of near and far perspectives using his mastery over grayscale, tonality, saturation differences, and then overlapping all these elements together. The collection includes black-and-white pen and ink work that illustrates this very concept – a technique he has been using since his youth.

“It’s kind of my sweet spot, my home, my most comfortable space,” he said.

From black-and-white pieces to paintings imbued in the color palette of imagination, each work aims at bending the laws of physics and tells a story of transient archetypes searching out their final places within the framework of the cosmos.

For The Chambers Project gallery founder Brian Chambers this show is deeply personal. His relationship with Vernon dates back to 2008 when the gallerist first met the artist and began collecting his work. In 2009 they began their collaborative partnership and there have been many projects in many forms since then.

“As a collector and curator, it is very exciting to finally be able to present an exhibition of his solo work,” Chambers said. “It’s been 15 years at this point – over a third of my life – since our friendship and professional relationship started.”

Since then, Vernon has also worked with Chambers under the moniker of the Furtherrr Collective, creating a collection of mural-size pieces. Vernon along with artists Mars-1, Damon Soule, David Choong Lee, and Nome Edonna have painted live at “Symbiosis,” “Burning Man” and many other events over the years, including most recently at the gallery’s “Togetherrr” show in March 2022.

Chambers mentioned that the original gallery in Nevada City was not prepared for the size and caliber of Vernon’s work, and only in this new incarnation of The Chamber Project – a larger space on Main St in Grass Valley – could Vernon’s work be displayed as it deserves.

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A native of New York, Vernon’s process involves layering ever-evolving compositions, or “studies,” to create larger pieces that represent the ever-evolving journey of an abstract expressionist idea.

“Sometimes something happens where I feel like I nailed it with the color and composition, so I will take that and superimpose it over an existing painting,” Vernon said. “I like the process of a piece going through a journey of reinterpretation and rediscovering. It shows the passage of time for me.”

The incredibly wide pool of influences is tangible in his work – from his beloved abstract expressionism to pop surrealism and the polished finish of figurative realism. Formally, his work is about the deconstruction, and hence the necessary reconstruction of visual space. From this central dichotomy stems many other juxtapositions: logic/illogic, physical/metaphysical, imprisonment/liberation.

With his move from Brooklyn, New York, to Grass Valley, California in 2010, Vernon changed his relationship with nature, and this new partnership with his surroundings yielded paintings that capture both macro and micro views of worlds in convergence – a dance between man-made infrastructures and the origins of life.

“The land really started to speak to me when I got here, and I couldn’t help but be drawn to traditional California landscape painters from 100 years ago, and with that, together with being around the land more, I started imposing a landscape format to my abstractions,” he says.

The driftwood installations are palpable manifestations of his relationship with nature. They float in space as if his 2d interpretations of form have walked out of the canvas to claim a new incarnation of themselves. Collected at the nearby Spalding Lake in the High Sierra Nevada region of Northern California, the pieces of driftwood are connected to form a narrative similar to that of his paintings: open to the viewer’s interpretation, and ever-evolving.

“What I hope people take away from this show is similar to what I take away when I see work that blows me away, that it really impacts me,” Vernon says. “It’s just a feeling, an impact, a guttural deep down place that the work just hits…a firework of thoughts, of questions that arise in the mind, mutate and dissolve back into ambiguity.”

About the “Counterpoint” Exhibit:

Opening 6pm – February 18, 2023
Closes May 6, 2023
At The Chambers Project Gallery
627 E Main St, Grass Valley, CA 95945

The Chambers Project Contact:

For more information contact:

Jon Ohia Gallery Director
jon@thechambersproject.com
(530) 777-0330

For more information contact:

Jon Ohia
Gallery Director

jon@thechambersproject.com
(530) 777-0330

SELECTED WORKS

“WHEN TO FLY” 2023

ACRYLIC ON CANVAS – 68” X 91”

“BILLOW” 2023

ACRYLIC ON CANVAS – 6’ TONDO

“COUNTERPOINT” 2023

ACRYLIC ON WOOD PANELS, TRIPTYCH – 7’ X 12′

“Strange Disguise” 2023

ACRYLIC ON LINEN – 30” X 36”

“DOT LAVA #3″ 2023

INK, GOUACHE, GRAPHITE ON PAPER – 22” X 30”

“MAHA” 2003-2023

GRAPHITE ON PAPER – 34” X 46”

INDIVIDUAL WORKS

INSTALL SHOTS

STUDIO SHOTS

EXHIBITION OPENING