• << Press Release Archive
• View Exhibit Slide Show

For Immediate Release – Los Angeles, July 25, 2007

PAIGE WERY
“My Sentiments Exactly”   a solo exhibition

Reception for the artist: September 15, 2007  
6pm – 10pm
Show Ends: October 20, 2007

Gallery Revisited is pleased to present the premiere solo exhibition of mixed media work by Paige Wery. Unadulterated by formal training and embedded with the desire for pure expression, her work stands apart from virtually everything else that is being seen in galleries at this current time. The work is bold and complex, raw and at once delicate, profoundly in-depth and yet totally hilarious, to the point of radical inquiry.

For this solo exhibition the gallery will accommodate large scale work that will span the interior of the space, in addition to individual accessible works, as well as little pieces called “Art Drippings”.

Wery works alone in the studio with her thoughts of friends and her influences - theoretical, real and subversive. She then resides in an imaginative place in her mind that blurs reality with meditative urban mythology to open a path to her subconscious.

“I have to be alone to work. Sometimes I put up cardboard on all the windows. I sit on pillows on the floor and start to list my thoughts on canvas. I try to decompress by making these lists.”

The lists she makes become texts of visual poetry - rants, poems, names, dates, music titles, cursing and more, riddled throughout the work. Amidst the words is a plethora of collage and mixed media ingredients, such as torn bits of art history books, paint, paint tubes, fuzzy pompoms, and glitter all solidified underneath a thick layer of glue and gloss medium.

Of important note is the use of every single thing in her studio. Lovingly referred to as “art trash” (or in the academic world – art detritus), Wery incorporates all that is acquired, collected, gathered, used, consumed. She uses every drop of paint – fresh and dried, every paint tube and every sheet of palette paper, all art packaging, store bags, liquor bottles from art gatherings and parties…everything.

Notwithstanding the obvious use of “art trash”, and upon closer inspection, we see into the personality and the psyche of the artist.

"I think I have a hard time throwing away the trash because of my love of art. Being so poor in the past, art materials became sacred. I’ve always been amazed and baffled by the amount of trash I produce while painting alone in my studio. So I save the debris and put it back into the art. I like attaching trash on top of something that might be considered sacred like an original painting, therefore bringing the painting down to earth and lifting the trash upward - the trash and art meet and become one somewhere in the middle."

Wery is working from a place of emotion and reality that becomes the concept. She embraces the irony and absurdity of being an artist in this art world and approaches her work from a most uninhibited place. In this way she is a true modern visionary and contemporary folk artist.

Paige Wery attended UCLA in Psychology then later attended San Francisco Academy of Art and The California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco. Abandoning academia to produce work of her own accord has led her to numerous local exhibitions and projects, curating shows, independent publishing as well as freelance writing for art magazines in Los Angeles.