James Goss: Wonderland

April 2 - May 14, 2022

The Pit Palm Springs

Almost as if raked from the sediment of the lake bed itself, thick, textured brushstrokes meander across the luminous landscapes of James Goss’s new body of work, revealing bucolic but tasty- looking scenes of far-upstate New York. The exhibition, titled Wonderland and featuring ten new oil paintings on canvas, will be on view at The Pit Palm Springs from April 2–May 14, 2022. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 2, 2022 from 5pm–7pm.

Cutting ties with both his conceptual practice and his professional escapades in the dizzying art world of 1980s New York City (which included producing a cable TV segment as the Co-Director of White Columns), Goss moved to the Adirondacks, where he has lived and worked ever since. For nearly fifty years, he has painted the same scenes in various seasons using the peculiar light of dusk and dawn, foraging for colors that run the gamut from cotton-candy pink to pea green to orange sherbet. Goss’s palette can feel uncanny, but its magic lies in its truth to reality—a play of light that indeed exists, but that few of us encounter in our ever-industrious lives. Goss takes something like Thomas Cole’s moody, allegorical cloud puffs and renders them as humble yet lucid atmospheric channels. And unlike the rest of the Hudson River School, whose members may have painted from these same lookouts nearly two hundred years ago, Goss doesn’t force the agrarian into the frame, doesn’t idealize nature or see it as a frontier—he marvels at its overpowering mix of beauty and banality.

Wonderland pays homage to these beloved Northerly vistas—ancient views that have remained unchanged for so long they manage to nourish a sense of awe while comforting with their familiarity, their easy-to-earn intimacy: “Each landform has its own amazing personality,” Goss says. In order to transfuse these personalities through the brush and into the universe, Goss makes use of exaggerated forms, like the tender, amorphous flowers mimicking mountain crests in Mountain Flowers (2021), or the speckled, strawberry-like trees in Path to the Lake (2021). In Goss’s New York, Birch trees grow abundantly in nearly every view with manifold potentials—sometimes the trees are like stoic bodies, other times like the sinewy fingers of a witch or the tentacles of a loch-ness. From lake, to tree, to horizon, to sky, Goss’s paintings pulse with the landscape’s ability to transform from electric self to electric self—each captures a burst of loveliness that will outlive us all.

James Goss (b. 1956, Bainbridge, Maryland) has painted landscapes since 1973. The second of eight children and the son of an Officer in the Marines, Goss moved to Hudson Falls, New York at the age of 12. It was here that Goss developed a long, deep fascination with nature. Of his long-time home in the high Adirondacks, from which much of his life’s work stems, Goss says, “The wonder of nature is endless. I’m here by design, not by accident.” Recent exhibitions include a solo presentation at Kantor Gallery, Los Angeles (2021) and 36 Paintings, Harper’s East Hampton, New York, (2021). Goss was a co-director of White Columns, New York, from 1981-1982, and holds a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

For more information please email info@the-pit.la