GEOFF MCFETRIDGE
SLEEPING SHAPES
September 8th - October 6th, 2021
Seeing Strangers Sleeping
Driving across the U S
Dusk winking with eyes
A lion in Montana
Deer in Pennsylvania
A year spent seeing strangers sleep
Bodies on the hillside
Bedded down in the park
Making eye to eye contact
With something animal
That we used to
Keep indoors
Drive Across It And You Will See
America is fishing
Mule deer
Rear wheel drive pickups
On land that even bankers don't want
For his last solo show “The Beringians” at Half Gallery in 2018, Geoff McFetridge included a painting of a cowboy squatting low to the ground. The piece was a nod to his maternal great-grandfather who had been a Chinese cowboy in Canada. The sitting position of the figure was meant to suggest that of a day laborer, and McFetridge’s summer memories of Calgary’s Chinatown. The deep biographical bond here might have been surprising to some viewers in such a graphically rendered painting. We can pinpoint the spiritual or metaphysical connection in Munch’s “Madonna,” a visible aura radiating from the subject’s outer coil, but are less generous imbuing the same existential qualities to, say, a Roy Lichtenstein. Geoff is determined to break through this outdated firewall.
The title of his new exhibition Sleeping Shapes is both literal and a very McFetridge way of translating the work in the show. Geoff has been talking about this aspect of his practice as well: where painting and a communication design meet. His image-making spans both visible reality and diagrams where he articulates invisible forces. This motif employed in the current show shares qualities with the “Graph of Desire” and other Lacanian mathematical figures which were supposed to diagram psychological structures and how the unconscious interacts with reality. In Geoff’s visual language, classically hard to explain things like dreams, feelings and ideas get a meaningful legibility.
He has also never been an artist to shy away from his commercial practice. In 2019 McFetridge collaborated with Apple to create a series of watch faces configured by programing. In 2020, McFetridge created the poster art for Spike Jonze’s Beastie Boys documentary. The commercial application of his skills are not something to graduate from as we saw with Andy Warhol or Matson Jones (the pseudonym used by Johns/Rauschenberg). Geoff embraces this output of his creativity and enjoys fighting against that cultural bias in the art world.
In writing about Keith Haring’s famous baby tag, Rene Ricard wrote “The greatest thing is to come up with something so good it seems as if it's always been there, like a proverb.” This is a quest Geoff McFetridge continues to strive towards.
Geoff McFetridge (b. 1971, Calgary, Alberta, Canada) McFetridge received his BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. McFetridge was part of the infamous Beautiful Losers exhibition which debuted in downtown New York in 1991 and went on to tour the world. He has continued to exhibit in international galleries including Blum and Poe, Los Angeles (2020); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2019); Half Gallery, New York (2018); V1 Gallery, Copenhagen (2016); PlayMountain, Tokyo (2013); and Heath Gallery, Los Angeles (2011). McFetridge has also been included in museum exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Yale University Art Museum, and The Geffen Contemporary at MoCA Los Angeles. He is the winner of the 2016 Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Award and was awarded The AIGA Medal in 2019. McFetridge lives and works in Los Angeles, California, USA.
For inquiries email erin@halfgallery.com