The Radical Middle: Stephen Maine and Christopher Miles

Washington D.C

Pazo Fine Art is pleased to announce The Radical Middle, an exhibition featuring the works of Stephen Maine and Christopher Miles. The exhibition will be on view in Washington D.C., at 1932 9th Street NW (enter from 9 ½ Street) from November 16, 2024, through January 11, 2025. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, November 16th, from 5 to 7 PM.

Maine and Miles synchronously confine themselves within the interchange of positive and negative, exterior and interior spaces, sublimating tactility in their emerging forms. Their processes indulge in the contradictions inherent in mark-making: each repeated layer responds to those established before it, culminating in a prolonged visual contemplation. The artists thematize the endless vectors of perspective embodied by the spectator, who is compelled to navigate emerging associations, convolutions, and discrepancies in the optical movement between each work.

Maine’s nine paintings featured in the exhibit are representative of his evolution in print-making procedures, replacing his previous adoption of carpet underlayment with robustly textured plates of plywood, insulation foam, plaster, glue, acrylic medium, and other miscellaneous studio materials. Miles’ six sculptures highlight his amalgamation of traditional ceramic aesthetics with the tailored constructions of assemblage, grounded in the industrial settings of ceramics manufacturing he experienced throughout his childhood. Both artists foreground color as the foundational optical sensation of their works, interplaying various levels of opacity as an additional visual constraint. In the semi-automatic production of Maine’s canvases—relying on the plate’s role in permitting reproducibility—color chords assigned to each painting serve as primary points of distinction. He reuses each of his plates, endlessly circulating them in the scope of his practice to highlight the imprecision of reproduction and elevate the workings of chance. Miles coats his sculptures in tinted glazes of heterogeneous compositions, materializing differently across external and internal surfaces: the interior glazes are marked by their leaky, dripping protrusions, while the exterior glazes are drier and stiffer, layered over fifty times on a single work. Both artists subvert casual spectatorship of their works, instead inviting what Miles describes as a “close reading,” a call for engagement with the slightest markers of difference, interacting tensions of visual dichotomies, and momentary slips in representation.

The Radical Middle refers to the philosophy of mediation through blends of the political left and right, examining overarching structures of political institutions; author Marilyn Ferguson defines it as “not neutral, not middle-of-the-road, but a view of the whole road.” Maine and Miles’ works holistically reflect on intricacies specific to the politics of spectatorship: the limitations of opticality are delineated through triggers of haptic memory, collapsing the distance between the spectator and the visual object.

Opening reception: Saturday, November 16th, 5 - 7 PM

 
PFA - Washington D.C

1932 9th Street NW, #C102, (Enter from 9 1/2 Street), Washington, D.C 20001

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Thursday - Saturday, 11 AM - 6 PM

+1 (571) 315-5279
info@pazofineart.com