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The Whole World In a Utility Pole With Overhead Transformer

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While it hardly seems original to seek beauty - or provocation - in the banal and everyday, you'd better watch your step after viewing a Paige Neuhauser show if you don't want to lose your balance - you crane your neck up without thinking and start to draw frames around quadrants in the air, to see patterns and relationships and compositions where before there was only skyline junk.

Vermeer worked with the same table, chair and map on the whitewashed plaster wall again and again, the same leaded glass window nearly always on the left; Constable's cows and clouds and church spires are no less familiar. Neuhauser's power lines bisect the sky into polygonal shards, her porcelain sockets, fuses and metal clamps loop like pearl necklaces, overhead transformers hum, aluminum Cobra Head lamp posts arc, and stolid water towers stand silent watch, silhouetted against Prussian fading to pale blue.

Occasionally, fragments of half-seen signage seem to telegraph explicit scraps of meaning that the brain tries valiantly to interpret, but "Fried," "Lucky Cue," and "Parts" slip away into meaninglessness, beautiful only as graceful tracery against the vertical lines of corrugated plastic. We slowly realize that the beauty would never have been as apparent when the full text was readable, and we begin to wonder if the original, unedited message had ever made any sense at all.

Neuhauser looks at the almost always accidental, unplanned beauty formed by the silhouettes and shadows of our almost always unlovely man-made world. The sharpness of her vision, and the affectionate wryness, the grace, with which it is presented, are anything but accidental.

- John Gallagher

COMMISSIONS:

For information regarding Commissions, please contact Paige Neuhauser at 917.687.1772 or paige@paigeneuhauser.com