First Floor Gallery, Center for Arts & Learning, Dec.7, 2018 – Jan. 26, 2019
James Secor’s work often features that which you don’t see, or rather, what you don’t typically look at. Vermont tends to create landscape painters, and many of them focustheir view on our breathtaking hills and valleys, sunsets and lakes. Secor,instead, makes you look at a highway median, a no parking sign, the alley between buildings, the storage units you drive past on your morning commute. He is interested in the parts of the landscape that fall away as noise between views, that get glossed over.
Recently, Secor has been attracted by the strangeness of storage units. Their geometry and repetition can give them a formal, minimalist beauty, made all the stranger because of what may or may not be inside. They speak to hoarding and consumerism; they’re the last resort for when the stuff you have – owned,inherited, acquired by accident – becomes overwhelming. They are calm containers for the emotions we can’t bear to throw away.
Fill your storage unit at http://jamessecor.com/asnotseen