Brad Spence: FantasyBoatLoveIsland

May 18, 2024 - June 22, 2024

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Brad Spence: FantasyBoatLoveIsland. This is the California-based artist’s fifth exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view May 18th through June 22nd, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, May 18th from 4-6pm.

This series takes the fantasy of tropical romantic getaways as the subject of inquiry and the backdrop for painterly gestures. The canvases are mostly improvisations, composed in solitude, yet picturing moments of social ceremony, celebration and excess. Figures are suggested through layers of finger-painting that upon close inspection dissolve into primitive marks. Airbrushed sprays of iridescent pigment bath these presences in colored lights. There is a prevailing lack of clarity mixing memory and its erasure with collaged rectangles hinting at photographic mementos that fail to come into focus.

The compositions suggest tsunamis of conflicting emotions in works that are both fantasies and mediations on the nature of fantasy. The identities of the social events pictured are elusive and changing, shifting between celebrations, rites of passage and rituals of the carnal and carnivalesque. These moment of revelry and abandon are as well shadowed by crisis both personal and global.

Entertained here are unmoored desires, like the decadent dreams of tourists. In the end the place fantasy shipwrecks upon empty shores is where transcendence can begin. Meanwhile an endless procession of mud baths, mediation retreats, nightclubs, destination weddings, coverbands, cruiseships, bachelorette parties, hottubs, beach fireworks and the threat of a morning light with no Advil at the bottom of the purse.

Brad Spence holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA and a BA from the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. Spence lives and works in Los Angeles and is an Associate Professor of painting at California State University, San Bernardino. Solo exhibitions include CSUSB Gallery, San Bernadino, CA; Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art, San Bernadino, CA; and University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, Long Beach, CA. Spence’s work has been included in group shows in venues such as the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; Centre d’art Passerelle, Brest, France; USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the Luckman Gallery, Cal State LA, Los Angeles, CA.