Winter

LMAKgallery is pleased to present William Binnie's exhibition, Winter, the artist's first
solo show in New York City. In this exhibit, Binnie presents paintings and light
sculptures. In his paintings he explores the medium's materiality in order to continue his
investigation into power structures and historical narratives via a personal and collective
lexicon. The light sculptures illuminate and further instill the quiet, saturnine psychology
that Binnie strives for in his practice.
Binnie's canvases compile and distill imagery from latent moments such as a boyhood
home razed to the bone in an unstoppable wheel of "progress"; the moon with all traces
of man erased and a lone flag on a doomed frozen mass. The paintings feel like
fragments of memories; moments that are processed out of the unease, despondence,
and frustration with the present - an individual response to a collective anxiety. By using
paint as both a crude object and a refined surface, fragmenting the composition of the
canvas, Binnie relishes in the contradictions of hyper-realistic narratives interspersed by
gestural strokes. These discrepancies and contradictions are not just a compositional
device; they are reflective of quotidian life and of the sociopolitical ruptures that seem
only to grow: a rumination on the mounting tensions and bleakness of the past, present,
and outlook on the future. Each small image is both delicate and blunt, and together
develop into a composition of sincerity, despair, but also humanism; they are distilled
moments that create a whole.
The sculptures throughout the exhibit light Binnie's paintings. Echoing Czech Hedgehog
anti-tank armor, the works are constructed of fluorescent tubes and embed the same
type of contradiction as his paintings: they bring light yet imbue a silent menace, fragile
counterparts to their steel derivation. It is in this tension that Binnie's imagery prods the
American mythos, through a personal and collective, rather than historical, memory.