Wayne Atkins makes paintings of exhibition spaces: the studio, gallery, and museum. Atkins fills his rooms with potentially realizable exhibitions comprising artworks of his own making exclusively rendered in paint, illustrating a tension between painting and sculpture, flatness and depth, reality and fantasy. The surfaces of the exhibition spaces themselves become an active participant, as each becomes a location for abstraction, filled with drips, drabs, washes, and other `moves.’

Goat (all works 2006-07) features Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram in the center of a Satanic tableaux-a headless bloody bat on a pedestal in front of a Sol LeWitt star drawing, adjacent to a pentagram scrawled on the wall, and so on, all seemingly joined together by an elaborate and partially seen system of pulleys-the goat’s leg is caught up in the rope. The rig seems a symbol of Atkins bizarre and frankly wrong, contextualization of the most famous of all the Combines, hinting that all of art history and contemporary art are but marionettes in Atkins’ repertoire. Goat also calls into question curatorial practice, suggesting that all interpretations are indeterminate.

Grid focuses on one grid-like element seemingly afloat in a milky white space. Some lines are highly rendered rope, or wood, while others are just swaths of paint. Upon closer inspection it’s clear that the structure and its shadows don’t correspond. A line that seemed to be delineated in one space all of a sudden seems like it was painted directly on the wall the so-called object floats in front of. Here is Atkins’ best example of spatial disorientation coupled with a series of seemingly accidental painterly moments. The layers of pentimenti and worked-over surfaces force the wall into the role of a Robert Ryman painting. This has the contradictory effect of flattening what had formerly been a three-dimensional, illusionsitic space.

In the zero gravity of Atkins’ universe a lighter hovers above a pedestal in a gallery littered with leaking gas cans. It seems the lighter would not be a worthy art object were it not for its ability to fly. Burn is perhaps the most dichotomous of Atkins’ interiors as it’s both boundless and The End. The artist could just as easily use the gallery for kindling as he could for inspiration.