Library Street Collective presents Machine Show, an exhibition exploring the innovative processes of painters Paul Kremer, Mark Flood, MOMO and Jason REVOK. Curated by Kremer, Machine Show will uncover the methodology behind the artists' works, showing painting alongside video, performance, and functional objects. Whether made to spec or fashioned from available found materials, an artist’s tools can be definitive for a particular series of works, and even have the potential to drive an entire career. With the acceleration of production schedules, tools can be made and modified to offer expediency in practice, create a spectacle in performance, upend convention, or create an aesthetic that leaves the viewer wondering how a piece was made. In taking matters into their own hands, the act of creating unique tools can express dissatisfaction with the status quo, available methods, and with movements in art that came before. Whether analog or tech-based, it is the ultimate act of progress to design new methods of production.

Machine Show is the brainchild of Houston-based artist Paul Kremer. Increasingly recognized for his organic minimalist abstractions, Kremer has developed a new series produced by rotating easels of his own design.

"I wanted to make an easel that could allow me to drop paint on a large canvas and move the surface to control the paint flow. I proposed some ideas to my friend Roy Kersteins who built a large swiveling cross. After the first few paintings, we realized we could control the flow speed if we could adjust the tilt. Roy developed a second easel refined to allow a 360-degree rotation and 180-degree tilt. This sparked ideas for different types of paintings, too many to count."

Kremer painted the easels with red and white warning colors to define the function of their various parts, and after doing so loved the way the structures looked as objects. The result left him wondering how many artists have made tools to create artworks, only to be hidden away or trashed after completing their task, "This sparked my interest in finding others who have done the same. Art that makes art."

Though these new paintings are a departure aesthetically from Kremer's previous body of work, there are definite links in palette, formal cues and minimalistic virtues. Moreover, the flat fields of color take on a livliness characteristic of his earlier abstractions, particularly when each piece receives its name. They are rooted in the same immediacy and primacy of the everyday, and the titles give cues to Kremer's reading of chance encounters affected by his easels. In Falling With Chairs and Red Rover, you see it - clouds of dripping color made into something more identifiable, tangible and fun.

Machine Show, on display from October 28 through December 23, 2017.