Chad Robertson - The Long And The Short Of It: New Paintings and Works on Paper - Now On View at Western Project

Western Project is proud to present a new body of work, The Long and the Short of It, by Los Angles artist, Chad Robertson. Two years in the making, the works are visually dense and highly detailed narrative constructions; pictures of epic natural and human events.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote:

"There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good- will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us."

In accordance, Robertson writes:

“I am interested in how the contemporary human mind makes associations with visual recognizable information and our instinctive, inherent need to draw narrative conclusions which are motivated by our desires, obsessions, prejudices, and world views…To find and construct a story using random information.”

Using images from travels in India, the news, Internet, film and popular culture, the artist layers and weaves his subjects into dream-like states, mirroring scientific concepts of simultaneity and constant flux. From political rallies, rogue waves, cyclone fences, to bees flying in the wind, these are pictures of contemporary life, of our current interconnected global condition. Compositions play out ideas of balance and chaos, order and accident. Robertson presents operatic histories ripe for interpretation; mirrors, or mind traps baited for our own enamored thoughts. Meaning is the end game and paradox is the grist and grit for understanding.

Chad Robertson has exhibited previously in Munich, Stockholm, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and at Sixspace in Los Angeles.