Hamptons, New York
Trevor Shimizu
Land/Time
The RanchTo make an appointment, please visit: bit.ly/3v5i15d The Ranch is pleased to present Land/Time, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Trevor Shimizu. Presenting several bodies of work, the exhibition explores the durational logic of memory––how it persists, shifts, and turns in on itself over time. Through the thorny terrain of remembrance lost and gained, Shimizu depicts worlds beyond eye’s reach. Isolated from the changing garden just outside his studio walls, the artist paints landscapes without immediate reference. Instead, he hypostatizes the flickering images that recur in his mind, fixing them with an ebbing impermanence. Catalyzed by the abrupt shift in his environment after decamping from the city to a town along the Hudson River, Shimizu has recently begun working in the landscape genre in earnest. Here, the daily developments of his home garden and the altering sightline across the river prompted his own musings on the valley. Unlike artists of the Hudson River School though, he does not chase mimetic exactitude. The slippage of precise representation and the intruding traces of elsewhere are welcome. He frequently deploys superimposition to create a sensation of an engram––the brain’s ability to see two stored memories at once. Layered images sometimes skirt by undetected, where a hazy passage feels like a particularly rich marinade. These bucolic atmospheres are absorptive enough to simply enjoy without dissection, but when regarded incisively reveal that part of their charm rests in their imaginary constructions. Formally, Shimizu builds impossible environments. A tide pool appears where geologically implausible. Dashes of dark indigo relate the sensation of seeing pine and apple trees from a moving car, with these blurred marks seeping into a scene of the Hudson Valley. Indeed, while some landscapes are born from observations made on walks taken mere minutes before entering the studio, others reach back decades to his childhood excursions on the Pacific Northwest coastline. Perhaps the most emphatic departure from Impressionism (the movement to which these are most frequently compared) is precisely the degree to which Shimizu’s paintings abstract from nature––allowing room for the persuasive sway of memory, artistic impulse, and optical instability. Shimizu himself has occupied many creative roles––as musician, nightlife photographer, archivist, even a painter of a more didactically conceptual variety. All the while, these works seem skeptical of rigid demarcations of time and era. Settling on the shoulder seasons of our lives, or the unsure period between fall and winter, what these paintings seem to tell us is aptly phrased by Culture Club: “Time won’t give me time.” Trevor Shimizu (b. 1978, California) lives and works in New York. He has had solo exhibitions at La Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels (2022); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2020); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Portugal (2019); 47 Canal, New York; Galerie Christine Mayer, Munich; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Misako & Rosen, Tokyo; the Rowhouse Project, Baltimore (2015); and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2013), among others. He has participated in group exhibitions at Stuart Shave Modern Art, London (2023); White Columns, New York (2015, 2011); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2014); and the Queens Museum of Art, New York (2012). Shimizu’s work is also included in public collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; and High Museum of Art, Atlanta.