The Painting Center is pleased to present Canyons and Plains, a solo exhibition by David Willburn in the Project Room. In Canyons and Plains, David Willburn draws on memories of the Texas Panhandle’s Palo Duro Canyon and the cultivated fields of the Southern Plains, translating their layered geologies and patterned expanses into textured abstractions. Using found materials—cardboard packaging, fabrics from disused clothing, painted muslin, and acrylic applied both directly and as paint skins—Willburn constructs surfaces that echo weathered rock strata, furrowed fields, and the shifting light of wide skies. The work does not depict these landscapes literally, but distills their rhythms, erosions, and repetitions into a personal visual language shaped by queer embodiment, memory, and place.
