The Organic Interface
V1 Gallery is pleased to present
The Organic Interface
A solo exhibition by Geoff McFetridge
OPENING RECEPTION: WEDNESDAY AUGUST 23. 2023. TIME:16.00 21.00
EXHIBITION PERIOD: AUGUST 24. - SEPTEMBER 23. 2023
Geoff McFetridge’s new body of work in The Organic Interface explores a concept that has been a constant source of inspiration and contemplation for the artist: How can images explain and communicate thoughts that are in between our understandings. On their way to some destination, traveling, transforming, evolving, becoming.
Most of McFetridge’s work originates in drawing.
”Much of my work comes out of trance adjacent states. Sessions of drawing where I pursue an open state of mind, not meditation but something like endurance, like how you feel while running, where you are open and your mind feels erased.
I’m not drawing ”ideas”. They often feel the opposite of that. The things I like to draw, paint and sculpt seem beyond me. They feel like they are resolving some thinking, or philosophy, that I’m not even aware of. Drawing for me is about starting somewhere and then moving into the unknown. Most of the work in this exhibition started with a simple proposition: our relationship to the natural world.
I think of how a potter places a lump of clay on the wheel. As they move the wheel and wrap their hands around it, it changes, often becoming something useful like a bowl. It is transformed from a shape that is hard to describe to something more iconic, and within our language ”a bowl”, ”a cup”. As the potter makes the bowl there are many states along the way that are neither ”lump of clay" or ”bowl”. When I draw, I like to create work that stays in that place. Pictures of things, before they are captured by language.”
- Geoff McFetridge, 2023
The works in The Organic Interface engage in an intuitive visual contemplation of our relationship to the natural world; around, above, below and beyond us. Is it there, solely to provide us with nourishment, wealth and entertainment? Or do we partake in a larger interdependent and interconnected system. Questions regarding consciousness, intelligence, empathy, being, ethics, freedom, and responsibility emanate from this group of work.
Geoff McFetridge (b. 1971, Edmonton, Canada) is a Los Angeles-based artist and multidisciplinary auteur. Instinctively ignoring creative boundaries, McFetridge’s practice includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, poetry, animation, graphics, ceramics, public artworks, and title sequences and artistic direction for movies (Virgin Suicides, Adaptation, Where the Wild Things Are and HER). He has exhibited widely throughout Europe, North America and Japan. Dan Covert's documentary on his oeuvre, Geoff McFetridge: Drawing a Life, came out to critical acclaim in 2023. The Organic Interface is his fifth solo exhibition with V1 Gallery & Eighteen.
