Masters & Pelavin is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent xerography paintings, works on paper and concrete sculptures by Thomas Lail. This will be Lail’s first exhibition at the gallery.

Thomas Lail was born in New York in 1967 and currently lives and works in New York City and Kinderhook, New York. His work has been internationally exhibited in such prestigious venues as: Galéria Jána Koniarka, Trnava, Slovakia; ArtCologne, Cologne, Germany; Economy Projects, London, UK; Galéria Cypriána Majerníka, Bratislava, Slovakia, Lawndale Art Center ,Houston, TX; Spaces, Cleveland, OH; White Columns, New York, NY.

Focusing on the ideal of the “Utopian Dream,” Lail employs image fragments sourced from communes of the 1960s and ‘70s, Modernist structures and idealized communities to form the domes and maps of futurist / architect Buckminster Fuller. Like most xerography, if the object is not flat, or the cover does not totally cover the object, the image is distorted in some way. The shifting of the object, the amount of light that reaches the image surface, the distance of the cover from the glass all affect the final image. By repeatedly reproducing these distorted reproductions with proper manipulation, Lail is able to create rather ghostly images.

Lail’s working process is informed by a constant gathering, collecting, sorting and assembling, the result of which is then recreated, interpreted and incorporated. While his methodology is most evident in collages and works on paper, which provides him with a template for working out ideas, it has recently been applied in his new xerography paintings. Layered grounds are assembled from an accumulation of smaller torn xerox’s that have been mounted to canvas. The subject, in most cases a Utopian icon, inevitably records the bumpy topography of the accumulation below. Furthering this concept of layering, Lail repeats his subjects, thus creating a loose series: a multi-referential catalogue of pictures, all slightly different, of the same thing.

In his new exhibition, titled after the pathbreaking and highly-popular publication of Peter Laslett, Lail continues to examine history and political thought through a series of variations centered on Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map—a projection of a world map onto the surface of a polyhedron . Fuller intended the map to be unfolded in different ways to emphasize different aspects of the world. Peeling the triangular faces of the icosahedron apart in one way results in an icosahedral net that shows an almost contiguous land mass comprising all of earth’s continents – not groups of continents divided by oceans. Peeling the solid apart in a different way presents a view of the world dominated by connected oceans surrounded by land.

Variations of Fuller’s Dymaxion Map are directly depicted in each of Lail’s xerography paintings and works on paper, which are created from fragments of distorted reproductions of “drop cities,” High Modernist housing projects, Goya’s “Disasters of War” and Courbet’s “Burial at Ornans.” From afar, this work achieves Fuller’s goal of showing “a precise means for seeing the world from the dynamic, cosmic and comprehensive viewpoint.” However, upon closer examination, figures found within the assembled imagery begin to develop relationships and interactions reminiscent of The Soviet writer Ivan Efremov’s utopia, “Andromeda” (1957), in which a united humanity communicates with a galaxy-wide Great Circle develops its culture within a single social framework. By also presenting cast concrete representations of the Dymaxion Map’s triangle edges, within the physical space, Lail allows viewers to enter in to the Great Circle with his subjects.