May, 2007

Back to the Burbs

For painter Robert Selwyn, such a sense of stability was shaken up by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.  Selwyn grew up in suburban Bethesda, Maryland.  His hallucinatory images of "squiggly" houses, as he calls them, resemble reflections on a pond's rippling surface.  What do they mean?  "They're open-ended." he admits, then thinks for a moment and adds, "But I think they refer to memory in general and to the memories we have of growing up in the suburbs, some very clear and others fuzzy."

Edward M. Gomez

From ARTnews
Summer, 2005

Robert Selwyn

Robert Selwyn succeeded in conveying disquieting aspects of American culture through his distorted paintings and photographs of houses, cars, and highways.  For example, Untitled (House) III (2005) shows a one-story white house with black shutters and flower boxes out front, but its features and sides are distended, appearing much as if reflected in a fun-house mirror.  Two white chairs sit on the front porch, and there is something particularly ominous about the house's small round window, perhaps because it's the only one that holds its shape.  It seems to exert control over the scene - and us - as if it were spying.  None of the windows allows a view inside; all are curtained or darkened.  The house seems about to disintegrate.  It is surreal and as ephemeral as the undulating clouds in the background.  In Untitled (House) II (2003), the roof dips where the apex should be, mocking the house as a status symbol.

Selwyn's paintings of highways, critiquing America's reliance on cars and their effect on the landscape, seem similarly on the verge of collapse.  Untitled (Highway) V (2003)  shows a nondescript car on a four-lane highway crossed by bridges, one of which trails off the canvas in a deep ripple.  The rest of the painting is "normal."  Selwyn's palette is predominately steely and cold, evoking desolation and isolation, reinforced by the absence of people.

Two platinum-palladium prints here were photographs of Selwyn's paintings, which are themselves based on photographs.  Highway IV (2003/2004), a photograph of the painting Untitled (Highway) IV (2003), showed a bridge that drooped and seemed to melt toward the road, as if damaged by an earthquake.  Further removed from their original images, the photographs projected a sense of nostalgia for, ironically, what the artist so poignantly depicts in the paintings as cultural decay.

Sandra Ban