Newman Popiashvili Gallery is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of Michel Auder and Paul Bloodgood. The exhibition includes a new video piece by Auder entitled The Weather Channel, along with landscape paintings by Bloodgood. The title of the show refers to the longstanding friendship and working relationship between the two artists. Paul Bloodgood was one of the founders of AC Project room and in 1998, he organized Michel Auder’s exhibition at the gallery. Auder and Bloodgood shared an artist dealer relationship and after the closing of AC Project Room in 2001, the two continued an open dialogue as fellow artists.

Michel Auder’s videos almost always involve the hidden camera effects of observing people and interactions between them. The Weather Channel, 2008 is unique since Auder eliminates the human presence and relegates his observation solely to nature’s capriciousness. Nature or landscape becomes Auder’s protagonist. The soundtrack -sounds of wind and rain – unmask and exaggerate the rawness of the image. It seems that Auder practices pagan Animism, making the landscape strangely “alive” in his video.

Paul Bloodgood refers to Auder’s footage in both the palette he chooses and the mood of his paintings. Bloodgood evades the use of a horizon line and creates views of mountains stacked one atop of another or paths winding skyward, forming a much dissected and highly schematic landscape. These aerial-like viewpoints stem out of his practice, which begins with preparatory collages that combine photographs and drawn spaces to create a new approach to landscape painting.

Auder and Bloodgood are both “topographers” of landscapes and although their approach to landscape is expressed differently in their medias – video and painting respectively – they each reach the necessary “peace” for this joint exhibition.