For the month of July, the gallery is pleased to present Marginal by local artist Roll Hardy. Hardy’s new body of work features Portland’s industrial landscape and abandoned scenes of the city’s urban environment. In Hardy’s bold representations exist a sense of quiet solitude that remains a dominant feature throughout his work. A vacant parking lot, an aging building, and an uninhabited house with graffiti are just some of the cityscape scenes for which the artist is known. His paintings demonstrate locations that go relatively unnoticed amid the city’s rapidly changing landscape. Work titles such as Demolition, Last Legs, and Remnants speak to the artist’s perceptive interest in exploring time and documenting the physical landscape. As Hardy puts it, “I’ve focused again on the banal weathered streets and facades, places close to or in the process of demolition…I’ve looked for interesting scenes and tried to find the hidden beauty in what we routinely pass by in our daily lives.”
Roll Hardy depicts the grittier edges of urban locales with a lively and impressionistic touch that focuses new attention on forgotten spaces. Hardy reveals a profusion of dispossessed places, occasionally reclaimed by inhabitants who seem to have taken a wrong turn and are the better for it. Through his unique perspective and soulful interpretation, Hardy finds the beauty in his untraditional subject matter.