February 17 – March 3, 1986

McPherson Library Gallery

This exhibition features paintings that abandon historicism of painting. Based on personal experience, the representation of the human images that reiterates the blunt inescapable fact of death.

My work looks more like the product of a kindergarten than the increasingly academic offerings of the institutes of higher learning. My work is not illustrative of the complex, involuted, rationalizations or speculations of late orthodox, modernist painting. In fact, my work abandons the stringent dialectic historicism of the latter, and its heritage of minimal and conceptual art which attempted to write the obituary of painting.

-James Edward Swain, Program of Work, 1986