“We live in Fortean times. We live in the beginning of a voodoo age of magic superstition and ignorance. We are the last generation that will ever know what it was like, to live in an enlightened world…”

-David Thomas (of the Cleveland band Pere Ubu) 1996

Schutz’s exhibition Stand By Earth Man is titled after a live performance by David Thomas and Two Pale Boys in which Thomas recalls mishearing Tammy Wynette’s Stand by Your Man as Stand by Earth Man. The paintings in this exhibition are conceived as stories to our future selves, or miscues to that future.

Many of Schutz’s recent paintings are cryptic, narratively incomplete and refer to conditions of interiority. They take place in intimate settings, where figures delineate their physical boundaries, looking into and through pictorial divisions. There are private spaces where the viewer is blocked from entry and public spaces turned private where the subject is not allowed to leave. Often the viewer is left to meditate on the back of a head or an unknowable exchange. Objects take on an uncanny presence and abstraction is used as a secret language. The paintings depict recurrent phenomena, such as plague, birth, driving and the tide.

In this exhibition, Schutz uses titles as proposals for the process of articulation and imagination. The titles “How we would give birth”, “How we would drive, “How we would talk” and “How we would dance” are simple and meant to touch on basic activities of our present lives. The tense of these titles locates the subject in either a speculative past or future, while alluding to a potential, fictional future audience. Schutz renders the recognizable indeterminate, presenting the everyday and the historical as slightly shifted, particular and mysterious.