Opening September 9, 2010 4:30 – 7:00 with an artist lecture beginning directly after the reception at 7:00 PM.

SD Mesa College Art Gallery

7250 Mesa College Drive

San Diego, CA 92111-4998

View Invite, Gallery Website, Artist Website

From the release:

The San Diego Mesa College Art Gallery is proud to present “Industrial,” a new series of paintings by artist Nicolas Gadbois. His work addresses the tension between industrial proliferation and the natural landscape. His subjects are the roadside spectacle along highways and freeways: billboards, directional signs, ramps, cell towers, satellite dishes and power poles.

For Gadbois, “These totems of culture represent the inscription of our society on the environment. My work draws on the facticity of the photograph paired with an artistic intervention to produce a painting that is a combination of both.”

Each piece starts with layers of industrial materials such as cement and polyurethane. Materials are built up and then excavated with a belt sander. The result is a picture that appears frayed, degraded and pixilated, speaking to the forces of entropy and degradation of the natural environment by mass technological culture. Gadbois refers to this process as ‘industrial impressionism.’

Nicolas Gadbois grew up in the Midwest. In the 1980s he worked as an illustrator for an advertising agency in Los Angeles. He began incorporating cement into his work in the 1990s. He has an MFA from Vermont College and has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland and Santa Fe. In 2008 he received a large public art commission from the Tri-Cities Cancer Center in Kennewick, Washington. He lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.