Andrew Reed Gallery is pleased to announce Dan Attoe and Anthony Miler: Chasing Light, the gallery’s inaugural show at its permanent space in Allapattah. In this exhibition of recent works, the two artists continue the lineage of landscape painting via their own distinctive visual languages. Dan incorporates his vignettes and astute cultural observations — at times slightly off-kilter from reality — into intimately rendered compositions. Dan’s application of paint bears qualities similar to that of the Old Masters. Meanwhile, the recurring ‘bird-eye' motif within Anthony’s landscapes speaks to their eternality. Our eye flickers between the form of landscape — taken as object — and the subtle gradation of color. At once meditative and direct, Anthony and Dan’s works show a keen interest and awareness of light as a core tenet, both of painting and in life.

 

The works in the show encourage close contemplation in different contexts. Anthony’s works offer a moment of stillness in a world consumed by rapidity and our obsession with constant occupation. The ‘bird-eye’ looks back at us while we look at it. Each of these works is titled Land is Witness. They pose the question as to the agency of land and its relative consciousness. How does land react to our assertion of authority over it? Time and power both tie into how one might bear ‘witness’. Are these land forms uninhabited and untouched, or are they in the midst of a reckoning exerted by forces beyond their control? Anthony’s works pose as many questions as answers.

 

Dan Attoe’s oeuvre speaks figuratively – and whimsically – to his Pacific Northwestern roots. Accretion #44 belongs to Dan’s ongoing series which incorporates smaller-scale vignettes into overarching scenes of nature. We are meant to take in the splendor of the great outdoors before we spend time with the ‘portals’ and their respective witticisms. Cave Pool and Desert Waterfall at Sunset are imbued with equal parts doom and the artist’s patent absurdity. As opposed to feeling a sense of dread for these protagonists in their beautiful environs, Dan has us ponder how they arrived at this very moment and what lies beyond.

 

Anthony’s paintings are baked in an ethereal glow. The light emanates from above, from the readily identifiable moniker of sun or moon. Yet, in these Land Is Witness paintings, light does not oblige by our standard conceptions. It casts evenly, unperturbed by the undulations of the landscape. Meanwhile, in Dan’s works, light obeys more similarly to how we perceive it. It comes from a central source, basking its surroundings before it dissipates in the distance.