GORDON TERRY

All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office

Opening: October 8th, 6-8 PM

October 8th - November 1st, 2025

John Currin says that great art should be open to all variety of cockamamie reads, far-fetched interpretations. What exactly am I looking at? A nod to Occultism, a specimen catalog, lost visions from an ayahuasca trip? The paintings of Gordon Terry wear many hats. They began as a series of curious painterly incidents, toggling between allusions to process and literal materiality, alien spacescapes, the gestural brushstroke, hallucinogenic portals, modernist abstraction, and geological form.


"It's important to me that the paintings contain my 'hand' on some level, and yet appear almost as if they were never touched by human hand," explains the artist. "Sometimes they appear on the verge of digital or the photographic. This is partially the result of how they are made. The paint forms, or figures, are never made directly on the surfaces. All of the painting takes place on a large glass surface. This is where I improvise with the paint, using brushes, spreaders, compressed air, and gravity. I think of this as the Dionysian part of my process; it's all experiment, accident, and surprise."


Ultimately, Gordon applies these forms to high-finish, spray-coated grounds on linen substrates. Yet for all the outcomes he leaves to chance, we witness what Charles and Ray Eames embraced as a "unified aesthetic." It doesn't matter whether two abstract entities co-exist side by side or a solitary oval finds itself marooned in deep black space-they are one. Like a Robert Ryman picture, we find these paintings different in their sameness.


"This kind of playing with opposites or dualities is something I pay a lot of attention to," continues the artist. "I imagine the paintings as occupying what are usually thought of as mutually exclusive territories. They sit somewhere between gestural abstraction, finish fetish, and dusty mid-century non-objective painting.


I love how the faces seem a bit like psychedelicized McCracken obelisks, while the exposed linen profiles with delicate drip edges remind me of Morandi's exquisite linen profiles." In distillation, Gordon Terry is saying that the work is a mirror not only to your mental space, but your cultural reference points, your sense of art history. Some viewers might observe "All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office and be reminded of the Denis Villeneuve film "The Arrival," while others find the words disco volante- Italian for flying saucer-on the tip of their forked tongue.