Shane Tolbert: Town & Country

In Town & Country, Shane Tolbert presents a new body of paintings and collages that unfold through layering, interruption, and revision. The works are built from poured acrylic, collage fragments, masking, and drawn interventions. These elements accumulate decisions over time. Earlier gestures remain partially visible beneath later ones. Each surface carries the sediment of its own making.

Tolbert’s use of plastic sheeting introduces moments of decollage. Poured paint is first cast onto plastic, then lifted and transferred onto the canvas. There, it behaves like a displaced skin. These passages interrupt the surface and preserve earlier states. This creates a tension between adhesion and removal, image and residue.

Painter’s tape is applied, painted over, removed, and sometimes retraced. It moves through the paintings like a temporary scaffold. These linear traces often appear late in the process. They map structure across fields of volatile color and gesture. What begins as improvisation gradually suggests architecture. Then, it loosens again into atmosphere and movement.

The title Town & Country hints at the shifting boundary between the constructed and the open. In Tolbert’s work, diagrammatic lines drift across painterly weather. Blocks of color behave like structures one moment and eroding terrain the next.

A parallel practice of walking informs the work. Fragments encountered along the way—packaging, images, and remnants of daily life—enter the collages and sometimes the paintings. These found elements and photographs quietly anchor the work in lived experience. Observation and movement through the world become part of the studio process.

Tolbert’s paintings do not depict that world. They operate with the same logic—layered, provisional, and constantly revised. Meaning accumulates through time rather than arriving all at once.