Mirus Gallery is pleased to present Lines of Vision Re-Drawn, an exhibition of new work by Steve Budington. The show, which marks the artist’s first solo exhibition at Mirus, examines correlations among painting, image-making, and the human body as an interface between culture and the environment.

Lines of Vision Re-Drawn will showcase the artist’s newest body of work, including new paintings, drawings, and prints. Expanding upon his previous work, Budington takes the human body, landscape, and technology as points of departure to re-draw viewers’ lines of vision by emphasizing the tactility of the world around us. In his system of visual synesthesia the artist uses the painting’s surface as an equivalent to skin, fashion, landscape surfaces, and technological surfaces to ask such questions as: What happens when humans evolve at the rate of culture? How do they compensate? What do they become?

In responding to these questions, the artist’s work explores a vast array of issues and ideas originating in the sciences, history, and art, from neuroscience and sensory theory to classical anatomical geometry vis-à-vis Da Vinci and contemporary anatomical imaging. Here, skin, sense organs, and psychedelic optical illusions become metaphors for human existence and consciousness. Illustrating that we are not just bodies of organs, blood, and bones, but bodies of cultural and illusionary senses that dictate our tastes and aversions, Budington paints, draws, and records our ongoing evolution as we transform and adapt to our ever-shifting environments.

Explaining how a painting can evoke a sense of this evolution, Budington states:

My paintings and other works are invested in the project of ‘making sense.’ My aim is not to provide literal answers to these questions but to respond to them with physically realized forms that reflect on the more inchoate, psychic, and difficult-to-describe qualities of being a human, in a culture, with a body.

Steve Budington (b. 1978) received his M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2004 and his B.F.A. in Painting from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2000. In addition to group shows at artMRKT, SF, and the Mirus Gallery, Budington’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in New York, at Exit Art, the Misc. Gallery, and the Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs; in Austria, at Schrattenberg’s “Hotel Pupik”; and in Italy, at the Fondazione Ambrosetti Arte Contemporanea. His work has been reviewed and featured in local, national, and internationally recognized publications such as Frieze Magazine, New American Paintings, and Art in America. The artist lives in Vermont, where he is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Vermont.

Mirus Gallery is a dynamic exhibition space established by entrepreneur Paul Hemming. The gallery features a program of contemporary artwork by emerging and mid-career artists in both solo and thematically organized group shows. Mirus Gallery highlights work that emphasizes skill and process and aims to engage viewers on a sentient, emotional, and evocative level.

In 2013, the initiation of an artist-in-residency program will pursue the gallery’s values of community and collaboration by providing a live-in/on-site studio space for artists to make and exhibit work in a supportive environment, conducive to creativity.

Mirus Gallery
540 Howard Street
San Francisco (CA) 94105 United States
Tel. +1 (415) 5433440
bailey@mirusgallery.com
www.mirusgallery.com

Opening hours
Tuesday – Saturday
From 10am to 6pm