PRESS RELEASE
PROJECT ROOM: James Kao
Oct 14 – Nov 20, 2021
New York, NY – Sears-Peyton Gallery is pleased to announce the inaugural Project Room exhibition and first New York solo-exhibition of Chicago-based artist James Kao. These eight works reflect on the world as a puzzle. They require deliberate slowness. The viewer confronts pieces to this puzzle as clean, worn, and undetermined elements. Many pieces are missing.
Kao’s paintings reference a quarry in that they are an excavation. A quarry yields artifacts and the quarry is also pursued. These paintings hunt an image that reflect our fragmented lands; and they look towards imagined worlds for guidance. These works, painted over the span of over 10 years, are united by layered mark making and seemingly ancient texture. Gnosis, 2012 references an array of the symbols that make up Kao’s paintings: architecture, landscape, figures, animals – the very elements that when extracted in fragments from the earth, provide insight to cultures of the past.
James Kao: Quarry is on view October 14 – November 20, 2021 in the Project Room at Sears-Peyton Gallery’s Chelsea location at 210 Eleventh Avenue. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday 11am-5pm. For more information or to request further press images, please contact the gallery at info@searspeyton.com.