Qualia Contemporary Art is pleased to present Inland Current, a solo exhibition by realist landscape painter Neil Griess. The show features acrylic, gouache, and pastel paintings derived from Griess’s home state of Nebraska, with an emphasis on the interaction between the natural world and the built environment. His pieces attend closely to oft-overlooked subject matter, such as stray grasses along a suburban creek or the raised lettering on a car. By dialing into — and lightly distorting — the visual information we see in our day-to-day lives, Griess recontextualizes it into something beautiful, strange, and deeply precious. Inland Current will be open to the public from April 5 – May 19, 2023, with an opening celebration hosted on April 8th from 4:30 – 6:30 PM PST.
The exhibition’s title, Inland Current, juxtaposes the idea of ocean currents with the artist’s landlocked home of Nebraska. As a landscape painter, the inclusion of “land” nods to his artistic lineage, while “current” speaks to the contemporary relevance of the work. While a few of his paintings take on a larger scale, most occupy a smaller canvas, creating a sense of intimacy and detail.
Griess usually works from photographs that he takes in places that hold personal significance to him — a field behind his elementary school, a bike trail, a nearby creek that has endured even as the land turned from prairie to farmland to suburbs. With his new series focusing on grasses, he used a fisheye lens attachment on his phone to create reference images with a skewed point of view and softer, blurrier edges. The process of painting allows Griess to spend slow, focused time with each captured moment, paying precise attention to each blade of grass.
Other paintings in the show also reference Nebraska, but take images from Google Earth as their inspiration; Griess began capturing glitched screenshots of his hometown during a period of distanced longing while he was away teaching in Palo Alto. The resulting paintings are simultaneously nostalgic and unfamiliar — beloved places seen from afar.
Straying from the traditional landscape form, the artist’s car lettering pieces often allude to a conceptual or imagined landscape; By shifting the perspective of the letters, which float in an unspecified environment, they begin to take on an almost monumental scale. In this way, they feel both highly specific and universally relevant. Viewed as a whole, Inland Current captures the feeling of a distinct place and time, while inviting viewers to see the wider world through the artist’s eyes.
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