Joseph Montgomery: Rules for Coyote

The work of Joseph Montgomery has the structure and syntax of sculpture, but it simultaneously has all the trappings of painting: wood, canvas, various types of coating and paint. The blurring and confounding of classification lends it a strange sense of hybridity. Montgomery’s expansion of abstract painting results in two distinctive types of painting: collages and shims.

For Rules for Coyote, Montgomery makes use of the colour scheme of the famous Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons (created in 1948 for Warner Bros.), which are situated in the southwest American desert. Red-brown (the colour of rock formations), yellow (the colour of sand), green (the colour of cacti), dark brown (the colour of Wile E. Coyote) and blue (the colour of Road Runner) are just a few of these constantly recurring colours. Montgomery humorously compares his practice with the fate of the coyote, who constantly fails to catch the bird but never tires of coming up with another ’solution’.