FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 5 - October 12, 2002 Reception: Thursday, September 5th, 6 - 8 PM TOM MCGRATH For the past two years, Tom McGrath has been painting urban landscapes as seen through the rain from inside of a car. The viewer occupies the vantage point of a car catapulting down interstates, freeways, urban overpasses and bridges, with the rain pressing against the windshield and reflective portholes of the car. The rain becomes oil paint and the windshield becomes surface - a reflective scrim through which the generic mise-en-scene of road culture becomes absorbed or obscured. Bodies in motion distort into painterly events, and disparate painting applications create shifts and fissures in the perceptual field, signaling possible break-ups in the attention or composure of the driver/passenger/viewer. The images evoke a moment in transit that represents a state of mind at once distracted and fully immersed. "Driving becomes the task of deciphering and reacting. The false sense that your body becomes the car is a result of how your attention relocates itself outside, as if your optical nerves were spread across the windshield. As a passenger, the passive nature of being driven allows for attention shifts that have no consequence in motion, as if one were in a heightened state of reception," says McGrath. The paintings evoke equal parts raw and mediated experience, pulling on familiar imagery from genre fictions, road movies, music videos, and auto insurance commercials. The car is a setting for an interior/exterior tension, the road outside often becoming a psychological map of the characters inside, promising adventure and transcendence.