Alastair Gordon: Pattern Recognition #2

Opening at the Mildred Complex(ity) Project Space

A L A S T A I R   G O R D O N

PATTERN RECOGNITION #2

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Opening Saturday, May 27 and Sunday, May 28

Reception and reading by the artist/author on Friday, June 16 

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Alastair Gordon’s drawings are reflections on time, memory, patience, and what William Gibson called “pattern recognition”,  simple markings and scratchings layered over rudimentary grid substrates. Alastair is also an author and critic. His books are about art, utopia, the built environment, and what Gaston Bachelard called the poetics of space. His drawings are fields of observation and duration. He draws with powdered pigments bound with gum arabic and black ink made from fermented carbon and pine-tree resin. The process is slow and repetitive, in the trance-like spirit of Henri Michaux’s mescaline drawings from the 1950s and 1960s, works that began as written texts but turned into abstract émergences.

May 22 – June 30, 2023

The Mildred Complex(ity)  • 37B Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY 12764 

Summer Hours  •  Saturdays 11–5  •  Sundays 11–3  •  or by appointment

Alastair Gordon is a writer and artist. He studied art at Princeton and Yale with Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Al Held, Joel Shapiro, Robert Ryman, Lynda Benglis, Barry Le Va, and Mel Bochner. He studied art history and critical theory with George Kubler, Andrew Forge, J.B. Jackson, Vincent Scully, and Robert Herbert. After receiving an MFA from Yale in 1978, he exhibited his drawings and installation works in both America and Europe. For more than twenty years, he wrote on art, architecture, and the environment for the New York Times and in 2008 became Contributing Editor on art & design for the Wall Street Journal. In addition to his critical journalism, Gordon has published more than 26 books, including such critically acclaimed titles as Weekend Utopia, Naked Airport, Spaced Out, Theater of Shopping, Arquitectonica, Romantic Modernist, Island Follies, and Wandering Forms. As Publisher’s Weekly wrote: “Gordon’s eye for the convergence of art, architecture and commerce is unerring.” In 2016, he launched “Poetics of Place,” a critical writing program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and has taught and lectured at many other institutions. Earlier in his career, Alastair served as the Robert Lehman Curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y. He has four children and lives in Milford, PA with his wife and publishing partner, Barbara de Vries.