Gary Faigin - The Age of Steam

The Age of Steam is an exhibition of new paintings by Gary Faigin. A Northwest artist and leading proponent of realist painting, Faigin focuses on the steam engine as the quintessential symbol of the Industrial Revolution. He depicts trains in a myriad of landscapes and fictional narratives, that beckon the train’s history as a fearsome and immensely powerful agent of change that linked coasts, devastated forests and buffalo herds, and even standardized time. The networks that railroads created were an earlier, physical version of today’s high-speed internet, changing the world’s concept of distance, and linking the formerly separate, like America’s East and West coasts. And yet, unlike the invisibility of the cyber world, the train has a dramatic and even theatrical physical presence, with all of its force and moving parts in plain view. Faigin’s paintings explore the two sides of this critical machine – its identity as an enormous mechanical sculpture which we cannot help but admire, while at the same time recognizing its capacity to forever alter the landscapes and people it encounters.

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