Rosamund Felsen Gallery

Steve Hurd returns to Rosamund Felsen Gallery with his most recent work, "Five  Fictions," a group of eight paintings that not only depict their mythical subjects, but also the  act of creating them in paint. This is perhaps most evident in a series called "Fairy   Business," in which Hurd first sculpts, then photographs arranged swarms of fairies, each  assigned their own color; he then uses those images to trace in paint the paths and  distances each fairy has traveled with their little paint brushes, allowing an imaginative  process to direct the work towards a kind of guided abstraction. In another piece, “End of The  Road,” a large-scale painting confronts the viewer with a full size semi-trailer truck, driven by a  pair of mummified zombies. As the title implies, this could be the last thing you ever see,  or, on the other hand, it could be about the end of petroleum based technologies, like the  truck it depicts. As with much of Hurd's work, there is not only an interest in documentation  through paint, but also an intention to preserve the moments that comprise the creation of the  completed work. Through layering and drippy application, Hurd endows each of his  painted subjects with their own memory. In "Tower of Babel," he has painted, in trompl l'oeil,  seven obsolete reel-toreel video decks stacked to a height of nine feet. Hurd is using the  pre-industrial medium of paint to inject new meaning into a now defunct product of  post-modern media, proving that painting is indeed not dead, and in fact thriving, even while  many of the promises of industrial production, in this case magnetic recording equipment,  become nothing but unusable relics.