Stanley Bell, Rory Devine, Michael Dopp, Martin Durazo, Jeffrey Gibson, Orr Herz, Daan den Houter, David Huffman, Johanna Jackson, Nathan Kitch, Gibran Mevlana, Tameka Norris, Andrew Pasquella, Robert Russell, Ohad Sarfaty, Tschabalala Self, Lisa C Soto, Ardeshir Tabrizi, Taylor Tschider

Roberts & Tilton is pleased to present Perfect Day a group exhibition exploring the syncretism of beauty within imperfection. The work on view will highlight the shifting of paradigms necessary to find beauty within imperfect gestures, the parallels between systemic ideas of perfection and modes of ideal image construction, and how the works on view engage with these possibilities.

What brings us to a perfect day?

Is the perfect day a seemingly sweet love story? Is it marked by the simplicity of narratives driving most timeless pop music. Or, is it the laid-back fantasy daydream of compiled experiences. Can one re-visit the perfect day, as one might revisit a book fresh, or does it evaporate once experienced? The perfect day is an auspicious contradiction, defined only as cumulative moments passed, seen through the lens of perspective; while experienced in the present, the realization of its presence lags achingly behind.

Perfection is fleeting, maybe illusory, always at a distance. The word alone neatly sketches a world. Yet a tenant of perfection is its very incompleteness, since only the latter can attain innovation, or sustain change. Roughness arising from aesthetic disruptions, rather than detracting from, add singularity and elegance; often, the most interesting effect happens without intention, a byproduct of what was originally predetermined. These subsequent “errors” present within accurate abstractions form constructed images that appear uncanny, subtly deceitful in the transmutation of old signifiers into new.

The works on view are conversational in their approach: artful while uplifting, subtle yet populist, affective rather than academic. They elude straightforward classification, deftly using the representational as a point of departure into the abstract, allowing the subject to become incidental to the compositional form created. This conceptual turn of analysis complicates notions of how art, as containers for the idealizations and constructions of the artist, transforms at the point where the work and the viewer intersect.

Here, in the light of the perfect day, distortion transforms an instance of banality into one of harmonious beauty, and then back again.