Greg Lindquist: Slow Burn

Time Equities Inc., Art-in-Buildings is pleased to announce the newest exhibition in the lobby of 55 Fifth Avenue, Greg Lindquist: Slow Burn, opening on September 17th. 

The cultural practice of rolling coal—revving diesel engines to release plumes of black smoke—serves as a potent symbol of petromasculinity: a performed, aggressive denial of environmental responsibility while nostalgically clinging to the power and pollution of industrialism. I’m interested in rolling coal’s many contradictions, from its naming—the smoke is not produced by coal, yet represents the power, ideology, and pollution of industrialism— to its wholesale denial of the environmental and human health damages. Evoking coal mines, locomotives, and electric power plants, the diesel smokestacks themselves conjure a nostalgia for an all but bygone era of coal mining and consumption. This aggressive act of releasing smoke is a performed masculinity, both violent and hostile.

My work captures and reconfigures the materiality of this smoke, creating paintings that both physically and symbolically embody the soot and carbon emitted during these acts, challenging viewers to confront the environmental and social discourses. This series “Slow Burn” engages with the cultural phenomenon of memes and the complex, often contradictory expressions of masculinity found in diesel truck culture and is roughly divided into three bodies: meme paintings, smoke paintings, and meme paintings set into frames imprinted with stainless steel tire tracks.

Shared online as memes, images of coal rolling concisely and virally validate collective anti-environmentalist sentiments. Overlaid text phrases such as “Happy Earth Day,” “Roll coal or the terrorists win,” and “Second hand smoke,” further expand the connections between authoritarianism, masculinity that conservatives harnessed in the 2016 election, falsely promising restored coal operations in the United States. By reimagining memes as aesthetic objects, I challenge the traditional hierarchies of text and image, exploring how these digital artifacts can be transformed from fleeting ephemera into enduring cultural statements. In redacting painted text, I reverse the typical read where text is given priority, allowing the image to take precedence and urging the viewer to slow down and engage with the visual content before interpreting the accompanying text, or its absence.

Scale and format also play a crucial role in my work. I experiment with paintings of memes, exploring dimensions significantly larger than the smart phone screen in which they are usually consumed. These expansive sizes invite the viewer to engage with the meme on a physical level, challenging the quickly consumed nature of these images in their native digital context. The CNC-milled painting frames are based on digital scans of tire tracks in the mud. These frames were made in response to looking at the ornately carved frames of acorns and oak branches that hold Hudson River School paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and asking, what sort of carved frames would be appropriate for a painting of a rolling coal meme?

Ultimately, my work does not seek to intellectualize the text or message of memes or the culture of rolling coal but to re-present them as objects of cultural, political, and theoretical discourse. By aesthetically augmenting these artifacts, I aim to reorient their legibility, inviting viewers to see memes and rolling coal not just as passing jokes or acts of political defiance but as reflections of our collective consciousness, asking the question: How can we reach across cultural and political silos/divisions and have

meaningful, open-minded mutual learning exchanges and collaborations with unlikely persons whom we might have biases and preconceived ideas about who they are and how they will behave.

– Greg Lindquist, Artist Statement

Greg Lindquist is an artist and writer living in New York. Lindquist co-edited the Art Books in Review Section of The Brooklyn Rail from 2011 until 2017. Lindquist’s work has been exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of Arizona Museum of Art, among others, and has been awarded the Sharpe-Wolentas Space Program, Milton and Sally Avery Foundation Grant, the Pollock-Krasner Grant and ArtOMI residency. His recent paintings and participatory installations have focused on applying the beauty of landscape and abstraction to raise awareness of environmental concerns. He currently teaches at Pratt Institute, as well as the Rhode Island School of Design. He guest edited the November 2015 Critics Page in The Brooklyn Rail titled Social Ecologies on the ruptures and intersections of art and ecology and curated a concurrent parallel show of the same name with Rail Curatorial Projects. He participated in the Whitney American Museum of Art’s Independent Study in 2017-18 in the Studio Program.

Image: Greg Lindquist, rolling coal (Second Hand Smoke), 2019. Courtesy the artist.

Greg Lindquist: Slow Burn is curated by Tessa Ferreyros and sponsored by Time Equities Inc. (TEI) Art-in-Buildings. TEI is committed to enriching the experience of our properties through the Art-in-Buildings Program, an innovative approach that brings contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists to non-traditional exhibition spaces in the interest of promoting artists, expanding the audience for art, and creating a more interesting environment for our building occupants, residents, and guests.