Lance Turner: Isomorphism and Objectivity
AUGUST 28 – OCTOBER 6, 2023
Lance Turner has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States, including the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art in Los Angeles, CA; the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis; the Visual Arts Center in Punta Gorda, FL; the Southern Nevada Museum of Art in Las Vegas, NV; the Farmington Museum of Art in Farmington, NM; and the Woodruff Arts Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Atlanta, GA. The artist has had four residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and was the first resident artist at Crosstown Arts in Memphis. He won the ArtsMemphis Arts Accelerator Grant in 2015, and the United Arts Councils of North Carolina Work Artist Grant in 2014. Lance Turner was born in North Carolina. He graduated from Memphis College of Art with a BFA in Painting and Art History and from the Savannah College of Art and Design with an MFA in Painting.
ARTIST’S WEBSITEARTIST’S STATEMENT
The paintings in this show are made by substituting the brushstroke with some other variable information, which could be a color, a photograph, or a drawing. Because the images in this show are sequentially ordered by grids, I took the opportunity to expand the photorealist grid method to include multiple number systems that overlap within the same grid increment. While the photorealist image may be a one-to-one translation, the mapping of other kinds of information creates a coded space in the way it is read. For instance, a torus creates a looped space or a gradient of a looped music sample creates a doughnut shape.
A recurring theme in this show is isomorphism, which is an identical object created within two different kinds of space, whether that is positive and negative, micro and macro, or two versions of an encoding. I use isomorphisms because they point to Alan Turing’s use of numbers as stand-ins for words in solving the Entsheidungsproblem and creating the first programmable computers. Turing’s work is important to me because I believe that this is where painting failed to keep up with technology, and I am playing catch up in a game that I can’t win, but I believe using multiple number systems, describing spaces, and expanding the possibilities of Photorealism will make interesting paintings.
A final source of interest in my paintings is objectivity. I use numbers because they are a language with axiomatic definitions. This is a purposeful rejection of Post-structuralism because you can never pinpoint a meaning if a painting is just a text with one set of intentions brought by the painter, and a distinct interpretation by each viewer that looks at the painting. I want to describe how subjectivity forms through the juxtaposition of many objective texts. While I believe pure, reductivist objectivity is possible in a painting, it is much more interesting to relate ideas and encode the driest language so that it is mysterious.
The Beverly + Sam Ross Gallery is located on the lower level of Plough Memorial Library in the center of campus on the Buckman Quadrangle, easily accessible from the Central Avenue parking lot and the East Parkway entrance. All exhibits are free and open to the public.
CONTACT
Scott A. Carter, MFA
Assistant Professor and Gallery Coordinator • (901) 321-3243 • scarte20@cbu.edu