Pentimenti Gallery welcomes the fall season with a solo exhibition by Steven Baris.

Jump Cut further develops Baris’ ongoing meditations on the experience of contemporary built space. The figurative geometric forms found in this work are derived from the expansive, yet often overlooked, complexes of ‘distribution’ or ‘fulfillment’ centers that are being developed throughout the exurban landscape. Through this series of paintings, objects, and works on paper, Baris exposes an apparent disconnect that arises while experiencing these areas physically within their augmented and increasingly overdeveloped environmental landscapes, as well as, conceptually as structural manifestations of the powerful economic forces that are rapidly transforming virtually every aspect of our societal framework.

For Baris, “The jump cut offers the perfect analog to the kinds of spatial/temporal disjunctions we often experience in our hyper networked and accelerated lifeworld. Of course, the representation of space/time in my work is not filmic but rather what I would describe as diagrammatic—a geometric syntax of nested and overlapping frames often modulated to suggest spatial projection. With many of the paintings, I superimpose divergent spatial projection systems derived from pictorial traditions from around the world. Each is a separate geometric-based structure that regulates the recession of forms in its virtual space. Ultimately I am interested in how these arrays of conflicting spatial cues and disrupted sequences conjure a sense of space/time that is highly elastic and ambiguous.”

Steven Baris received his MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA. He studied at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA and at Instituto Allende, San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Baris has exhibited widely in the US and internationally, in museums and institutions: Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT; Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, DE; Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ; Atelierhof Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany; International Biennial of Non Objective Art, Pont de Claix, France; Kunstlerhaus Dosenfabrik, Hamburg, Germany; Carnegie Mellon University Art Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA; The Drawing Center, New York, NY, and more. His work is included in numerous corporate and private collections across North America, Europe and Australia.