Set somewhere on the outskirts of our recognizable galaxy, the universe of painter Steve Galloway is scattered over numberless chunks of swampland where grotesque events transpire in bizarre, bucolic tropics that William Henry Hudson might have imagined in a paranoid, malarial dream.
Though it may resemble our own world, Galloway’s is really a parallel universe, beholden only to laws of its own. Familiar images – corks, pulleys, anthills, and tikis – lure us into thinking we are on home ground, but the similarity ends abruptly when the artist subjects these objects to incongruous juxtapositions that defy normal rules of physics. An image-maker par excellence, Galloway constructs dramatic pictorial situations that couldn’t possibly exist outside a poet’s imagination.