Bruce Silverstein Gallery is pleased to announce Tethered, an exhibition by Randy West. Randy West creates the majority of his photo-based projects as series with marked attention to the form, material, and tactile quality of his subject—in this case, the architectural structure and abstract shape of crumpled photographic paper.

For West, the Tethered series began as an aggressive act of cutting and throwing away rejected images—his own discarded works that he has shredded and balled in his hands. West forces these scraps of photographic paper into sculpted gestures with the intent of creating a new two-dimensional work acting as a purposeful response to the original.

West speaks of the series: “My act was a response to what someone else wanted or didn’t want. For better or worse it was a need to be accommodating and accepted. “ West’s earlier series, Arrangements and bird rabbit snake, are equally concerned with the emotional connotations inherent in line and abstract composition. For the Tethered series, the artist’s creative interests reside in sculpture, the image serving as record and document of a form once existing in real space. Appearing almost three-dimensional, the paper sculptures seem to project from the wall, inspiring the viewer to impose or extrapolate meaning from the expressive yet simplistic quality of these images born from action.

This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery. Randy West was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. He received his MFA from CalArts in 1986. West’s photographs have been collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, The Fischer Collection, San Francisco, Aaron Siskind Foundation, New York and the Pasadena Arts Commission, California among other private collections. A monograph of bird rabbit snake was published in 2005.