Neil Wedman
"Neil Wedman" by Ben Reeves, Fall 2008, pp. 162-63
Neil Wedman’s exhibition “Untitled Flying Saucer Monochromes,” curated by Steven Tong, consists of five elegant, pearl-grey monochrome paintings and a smart accompanying essay by Jessie Caryl. At first blush that seems to be about it; only the quizzical reference to UFOs needs some puzzling over. But as one’s eye slowly adjusts to the subtleties of the impassive grey fields, faint silhouettes begin to resolve themselves along the paintings’ lower edges. Some leaves. Grasses. A fence post. Perhaps the shape of a barn.
Then, unexpectedly, in the flat “sky” of each work, an apparition—a small, faint flying saucer—appears. This is when the paintings truly spring to life. Not only are we faced with the paradox of imagery emerging from the surface of minimal art, but this extraterrestrial visitation also coyly lampoons and exposes the modernist impulse to read the monochrome surface as absolute, infinite and transcendental.
Contextualizing the apogee of modernist painting in this way certainly knocks it down a peg or two. Wedman posits an equivalence between high art’s claims of mystical purity and the popular need to believe that we are not alone in the universe (with the attendant sci-fi B movies, etc.). It is notable that the source images for Wedman’s pieces were drawn from the enormous body of hoax UFO photography dating from the 1950s and are roughly contemporaneous with the high-modernist painting he also references. The suggestion that these two impulses might share a common root is a humorous proposal of the existence of myriad compelling historical commonalities.
The independently seductive elements of Wedman’s work (transcendent abstraction and flying saucer) are unified and suspended in each painting’s paradoxical surface. However, close inspection reveals that the landscape and saucers were painted together on one layer and then covered with numerous semitransparent coats of grey. This discovery is slightly disappointing, like recognizing that it’s a hubcap floating Frisbee-like in the hoax photograph’s sky. Here the spell is broken. The work ceases to be a new and magical proposition—representational minimal art—and operates as a rebus, with clear and distinct terms.
I immediately wanted to step back and forget what I had seen in order to recapture the impossible apparition. Perhaps this indicates that the sly humour in Wedman’s paintings is not directed solely at the historical desires and anxieties of the Cold War, but still has teeth today.
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