Brian Rideout
The East Gallery
about
Brian Rideout makes pictures about pictures. His work investigates contemporary print and online images, for their art historical relevance, as a continuation of the history of painting and image production. Rideout’s works comprise a narrative of art, architecture, and object following an undulating cycle of definition, utility, and design, softly dramatizing the multiple registers that art has come to occupy and employ over time as a material thing wholly existing in the world. He is interested in art as document, as decoration, as ideological accessory, as technological or functional support.
Rideout was the 2017 recipient of The Premier’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts (Emerging). He studied at Georgian College (Barrie, ON) and has recently had solo exhibitions at MKG127, Parisian Laundry, AC Repair Co., and Georgian College. Recent group shows include Spring/Break Art Fair (NYC), Art Toronto (Toronto), “Unkempt” at MAW (NYC), “Open House” at Sleep Center (NYC).
-
Rideout culls images of lush interiors dating from the second half of the Twentieth Century, for which the references are primarily housed in printed matter: interior design magazines, how-to books and the digital records of their pages that now circulate the Internet. As a painted translation of the photographic, realism here is not only stylistic, but also fundamentally significant at the level of content.
For Rideout’s paintings not only represent the history of taste through objects, they too consider the decisive role of the archive in the organization of this history. These are paintings of records as much as they are of spaces. Furthermore, by rendering the photographic in paint, Rideout is able to conflate media and time. Processes of documentation, collection and preservation are fused across historical boundaries.