our shallow psychic death

our shallow psychic death brought together paintings and sculptures in which figuration repeatedly approaches disappearance. Faces, bodies, signs, and ordinary objects remain legible, but only through surfaces that obscure, abrade, or interrupt them.

The paintings hold recognizable images inside dense fields of black, green, white, and red. The sculptures extend the same instability into the room: figures and domestic forms appear damaged, provisional, or caught between use and representation. Across both media, the exhibition treats recognition as a material event rather than a secure fact.

Presented in Detroit in 2016, the exhibition marks a point at which Swanson’s paintings and objects became fully interdependent. Each work tests how much of an image can be removed while its psychological charge persists.

Read the original exhibition text

Photography courtesy the artist and gallery.