Not Kansas

Artist Nathan Redwood transforms familiar landscapes into swirling, colorful wastelands as if tossed by psychedelic tornados. Skies explode in thick brushstrokes. Houses are ripped to their skeletons, wrenched into Seussian shapes. His work is dense, fluid, and chaotic, pointing toward psychological dysfunction and hinting at a post-Katrina landscape. In Landscape with Fireworks, chunks of blacktop roadway sit among stripped-bare houses while the skies are alight with two-by-four firework blooms. People seldom appear, but those who do are made up of the same mad combination of lumber and bric-a-brac — men have lamps, buckets, and springs for heads, their ramshackle bodies drawn from scrap lumber. The paintings in Redwood's new show "Recent Works," however, seem to move from rural areas caught in mid-devastation to alternate worlds where chaos reigns. In one, strips of wood seem to have been torn from their moorings by fierce winds, but, airborne, they appear strangely calm — the title hints at the new physics: Floaty. Mighty Mud does away with reason altogether, with thick ribbons of earth arranged in human forms, rising high off the earth and waving white flags.
Oct. 19-Nov. 21, 2007