Exhibition on View: December 16, 2023 – February 10, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, December 15, 2023, from 6-8 PM
Artist Talks: Saturday, December 16, 2023, starting at 2 PM
Hallway Gallery
Art League Houston (ALH) is pleased to present re-rite, an exhibition of paintings created by Doug Welsh over the past three years, each considered complete at various moments, and then not. An extension of his ongoing body of work, Life Raft, Welsh chose to re-enter each painting and re-rite his creative process to re-resolve the artworks.
Navigating the world with music as his companion, Welsh paints while listening to a single song on loop. Historically, Welsh has completed paintings one at a time. For this show, Welsh initially worked on all of the pieces congruently, reverberating between works. To facilitate this new approach, they created a playlist of songs associated with each painting, and used the shuffle feature to determine which painting they would visit next, adding elements of chance and choreography. After looping a single song until that painting felt either harmonious or tenuous, he would press shuffle again, and move on to the next painting. The cyclical nature of his expanding practice provides a sense of stability. Anchored by the looped music, Welsh explores lyrical, balanced, disruptive, angsty, synchronized or tumultuous color and spatial relationships in each painting.
To re-establish a connection with these previously unfinished pieces, Welsh first assembled them together in the studio. He covered them with an assortment of objects, including a dried bouquet of flowers, a pair of fishnet gloves, bark from a recently felled tree next-door, plastic leaves, mementos from walks, leftover canvas scraps, discarded paper shapes from his classroom, and cutout wooden pieces from old paintings. Welsh spray painted through and around the objects to create new relationships on the surface of the paintings. From there Welsh carved out new lines, shapes and forms which guided the paintings to their eventual resolution, while looping each song with each companion painting.
This show also debuts the artist’s first collaboration with musicians. Music by Taylor Marberry, Jenny Marshall, Mitch Pengra, and Alex Venzke were recorded and looped while painting Time and Song To The Siren.
About the Artist
Doug Welsh (he/they, b. 1991) is a queer painter, writer, curator and co-founder of the G5 Collective. He received his MFA from the University of Houston and his BA from Bates College. He has exhibited with Art League Houston, Pablo Cardoza Gallery, The Jung Center, F, Galveston Artist Residency, Jardín, Blaffer Art Museum, Foltz Fine Art, Anya Tish Gallery, Box 13, Sanman Studios, Hardy and Nance Studios, Elgin Street Studios, and Studio 9D in NYC. Welsh is a contributor to Glasstire. In 2022, his work was included in New American Paintings, edition 162.
Instagram: @dpw_art