Pelavin Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Timothy Paul Myers, titled_ The Ontario Ration_. In celebration of Pelavin Gallery ’s thirty year anniversary, in January 2011, Myers bases this exhibition on a found business ledger chronicling the last thirty-years of an egg farmer named Myron B. Johnson, circa 1899-1929. This will be Myers first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Repetition and the use of unlikely materials—two prominent themes in Myers’ work—continue to be displayed in this exhibition, as Myers makes use of hundreds of pages from a thirty-year business ledger of Myron B. Johnson, circa 1899-1929; one-thousand trading cards, circa 1900s-1930s; and one-hundred-thousand stacked pencil pieces individually topped with a single drop of acrylic paint from the artist’s palette of over one-hundred-fifty hand-mixed colors. Myers showcases contradicting components in arrangements of extraordinarily organized grids, most of which are encased within pristine plexiglass display cases. The artist’s conscientious consideration of presentation allows him to showcase his almost compulsive use of repetition and unlikely materials as specimens of his own obsession.

Using a found business ledger, circa 1899-1929, of a relatively unknown egg farmer as the foundation of this exhibition, Myers attempts to portray the imaginary life-story of the ledgers’ creator, Myron B. Johnson. Myers uses the title page of Johnson’s ledger, which begins with the heading: The Ontario Ration, as inspiration for the title of his exhibition—the actual title page is also used as the center point of the exhibition in a piece also titled The Ontario Ration. Surrounding this piece, Myers creates fantastical allusions to the farmer’s cultural and historical anthropology through mixed media collages and sculptural pieces.

The viewer enters the exhibition through Myers’ installation of Crop, a piece that makes use of the gallery’s architectural details—a twelve-foot hallway leading into the gallery’s main viewing space—the artist covers the walls of this area with thousands of stacked pencil pieces adhered to the gallery walls. Once entering the main viewing space of the gallery, the viewer is confronted with Trade, a 60×60 inch plexiglass display case filled with hundreds of individually framed American trading cards, circa 1900s-1930s, that Myers has covered with drawings reminiscent of the Indigenous arts of the artists’ native land. Myers continues to showcase his mixed media pieces behind these immaculate display cases, exemplifying the materials within. In Myron B. Johnson (Thirty-Years), Myers focuses on Johnson’s personal economic history by combining layers of hand-cut pages from the farmer’s business ledger with other mixed media and encasing the entire collage behind a 36×108 inch plexiglass display case. Also, the largest work in the show, Muzzle, an atmospheric piece that becomes the backdrop for the entire show, consists of 500 colorful mixed media pieces individually encased in 3 inch plexiglass display cases that have been mounted directly to the wall in a forty-foot grid. Myers’ sculptural works also make connections to Johnson’s lifetime and lifestyle— one of Myers’ more playful pieces in the exhibition, titled The Chase, displays a taxidermy fox with its legs submerged in an elegantly cast concrete mold.

Born in Australia in 1972, Myers studied at Texas Tech University. He has recently been the focus of numerous articles and interviews in such prestigious media outlets as: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and WWD Magazine. The artists’ work has been widely shown in gallery and museum context in America as well as internationally and has been included in such prominent permanent collections as Richard Meiers’ One Grand Army Plaza and the entrepreneur Tory Burch.