Timothy Gaewsky
Painter

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Timothy Gaewsky is a painter and multidisciplinary artist who has exhibited both nationally and abroad in group exhibitions at galleries and museums including AC Institute (NYC, NY), Punch Gallery (Seattle, WA), Gallery Project (Ann Arbor, MI), Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, OH), AQUA Art Miami (Miami Beach, FL) and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam, NL). Gaewsky earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art. He was awarded an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council in 2015. Gaewsky lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio.

My current paintings address a personal nostalgia for Nintendo NES video games that I played growing up in the late 1980’s and early ’90’s. The various design elements and patterns used by the game developers to create the graphic environments become significant source material and a point of departure for my compositions. I’m interested in how the arraignments of modified game references and manipulated visual cues can spark a sense of nostalgia, i.e., a deceptive or false memory associated with games from that era. My interest is not in replicating the games, but in how each painting becomes a pseudo-screenshot of a new level of an expansive video game I’m creating for myself.

The Homage series, in particular, consist of appropriated design elements from some of my favorite games. I have chosen certain stages, or levels, from these game for their composition, color scheme and/or iconic resonance. I’m interested in reducing the visual information in the game into a more minimal interpretation in the painting. All game characters and commonly associated pixelated graphics are eliminated, leaving the paintings rendered in a flat, hard-edged painting aesthetic. My aim is to transform the fast-paced game play into a more slowed-down, sentimental viewing experience of the painting.

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