Cheyney Thompson

Cheyney Thompson’s paintings, photographs, and installations investigate the contemporary landscape of invention and distribution. His 2006–07 show at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York offered a systematic exploration of this network. Entitled Quelques Aspects de l’Art Bourgeois: La Non-Intervention (Certain Aspects of Bourgeois Art: Non-Intervention), Thompson’s installation comprised multiple parts: a series of twenty-five color offset lithographs depicting the gallery’s art storage bay, clustered in five quintets; four large abstract grayscale oil paintings derived from blurred photocopies; and eight lightweight folding tables on which were displayed sixteen imageless photographic prints progressing from white to black. A viewer following the diagonal path of the tables would traverse the gallery to be led to the storage bay pictured in the lithographs, completing the narrative circuit. Thompson’s works commonly employ these tables as pedestals or neutral presentational devices, as in Table of Blood and Guts (2002) and Table Displaying Gifts from the Landlord and Working Papers (2006). This efficiently mutable form suggests a relation to the portable economy of the street even as it serves as an organizing frame for the objects it shows off. Questioning protocols of exhibition as much as techniques of production and their contingent modes of reception in the space of the gallery, Thompson assumes the history, practice, and circulation of painting as his subject.