McClain Gallery is happy to announce Shane Tolbert’s third solo exhibition: Memory Dilemma. The exhibition expounds on the artist’s process based work, including figurative drawings for the first time, alongside his painting and collage work. Playing off of Tolbert’s layering technique, the drawings reveal a cyclical return to imagery, thought process, and the way themes are honed through thoughtful play and automatic response.

Tolbert furthers his experimental practice and mines the studio as a place of potential: somewhere memory and experience, stored in his body and muscle, can translate onto canvas or paper and tell him something he didn’t know before. As Tolbert puts it: “[Memory and experience] accumulate in my emotional state each day I enter the studio and compound in the work over time like sedimentary layers of mudslides and volcanic ash.” Studio ephemera, like painter’s tape, often makes it into the finished work, as a reminder of the originating space. Tolbert’s tried and true painting techniques – like masking, in which the tape is applied, painted over, and then removed – and his acrylic paint pours on plastic sheeting – applied like decals to the canvas – are emblematic of that process. The layering of patterns in the works on canvas continue to create visual tension as titles provide hints to personal experiences: Pencil Me In and Overcommitted and Okay give us a peek into the artist’s quotidian experiences.

The series of works on paper depicting cowboys was created during a residency at the Ucross Foundation in November of 2022 and takes place at a working ranch in Wyoming. Tolbert began each day with a portrait of a smoking cowboy as a reflection on masculinity, expectations, violence, and isolation: likely themes in such a remote place of work. He used a different medium each day: charcoal, permanent marker, graphite pencil, collage elements. Each portrait was approached with no conscious ideas, but relied on muscle memory. The resulting cowboys are sometimes forlorn while others are confident with a sense of swagger – perhaps a distillation of the artist’s state of mind but just as likely is a sense of memory of past encounters, or an affect from someone else, trickling into the work. As a working artist and creative worker, running the space Best Western out of Santa Fe with fellow artist James Sterling Pitt and undertaking arts administration work at a nearby university, Tolbert knows all too well the million directions one gets pulled into daily. Tapping into his subconscious responses threads Memory Dilemma into a tapestry revealing Tolbert’s approach to art-making amid the distractions of daily life.