ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce Trash Day, a solo exhibition by Josh Reames in Gallery One.

Chicago, IL, June 4, 2016- ANDREW RAFACZ presents Trash Day, a solo exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Josh Reames. The exhibition continues through Saturday, July 16, 2016.

With his delicately layered paintings of perennial symbols, figures, computer graphics, emoticons, buzz words and post-graffiti scrawl, Josh Reames plugs directly into our contemporary dilemma, poking fun at our desire for the abbreviated and dashed off, while articulating our relentless need for meaning. Utilizing a wide but synchronized amalgam of techniques including action painting, graphic design, graffiti, rudimentary drawing and trompe l’oeil, his paintings engage in a familiar palimpsest, stacking sign after sign, in a flattened, a temporal and borderless landscape that approximates the experience of an incessant internet search.

With his newest series of paintings for his first solo exhibition with gallery, Reames extends his ongoing conceit of discarded signs and instant relics of a throwaway culture to create a rich visual narrative of a real and imagined trash day. Combining imagery directly associated with the collection of our detritus (trash cans, dumpsters, recycling bins) and the banal but poeticized items that might be found in them (rotting bananas, lit cigarettes, hot dogs, coffee mugs), Reames presents a gratuitously humorous tableau of our existence as beings that must create waste.

With his paintings for this exhibition, the artist has concentrated his palette on grey-scale and off-white backgrounds with energetic neon pink accents in the foreground. Yellows, browns, reds and blues are scarcely introduced in the form of bananas, deconstructed hot dogs, disembodied human arms, and pigeons. Their compositions rely more directly on a physical landscape with backgrounds that suggest lived-in urban alleyways and city recycling locations, while their top layers continue to exist in the compressed, virtual space that the artist has become so well known for.

JOSH REAMES (American b. 1985) lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2012. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Brand New Gallery, Milan; Luis de Jesus, Los Angeles and Josh Lilley Gallery, London. His work was recently seen in Continuous Surfaces, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York and is currently on view in The Aging Coconut at Roberto Paradise, San Juan. Other recent group exhibitions include The Negative Hand, Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City (2015) and Post-Analog Painting, The Hole, New York (2015). He will have solo exhibitions at Tristian Koenig, Melbourne and Tom Christoffersen, Copenhagen, later this year. His work is in numerous private and public collections.