Check out Eraser Volume 2 organized by the wonderful Brian Edmonds who also runs Curating Contemporary. I’m so grateful to be listed amongst - and in conversation with - the artists in this magazine. I had a Q&A with Ky Anderson & Rick Briggs. It was such a pleasure to send and receive these correspondences just as Covid Quarantine’s were taking place. Art conversation and research is really a life saver.
Grant Recipient
I’m so excited to announce that I have been awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Based in Québec, Canada, the Foundation “provides financial assistance, by way of grants, to young artists who are pursuing their studies or are in the early or developmental stage of their career, are working in a representational style of painting, drawing, sculpture or printmaking, and demonstrate the determination and talent to pursue a lifetime career in their art practice.”
Please consider joining me for the opening reception February 1 from 2 -4 pm
Heat Salt Acid Waves is an exhibition of recent works by Leeza Meksin, Nickola Pottinger, and Padma Rajendran, curated by Lauren Whearty at the Painting Gallery at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pa. The exhibition opens with a reception on Thursday January 30, 4-6 pm and is on view from January 27 to February 27, 2020
While their stories and subjects range widely, Leeza Meksin, Nickola Pottinger, and Padma Rajendran’s works come together through the process in which they think through material, color, and form. Images, processes, and other elements ebb and flow in the breadth of their works, as each artists flirts with and crosses the boundaries of many traditional art categories and expectations, especially our expectations of Painting - as both a process and a history.
Meksin, Pottinger, & Rajendran are all New York based artists who happen live between two different cultures: American and Russian, Jamaican, or Malaysian respectively. This is but one way to think through the connections amongst their works as existing across categories and working methods such as: abstraction and representation, illusionistic and physical space, drawn/painted and collaged marks. Their mastery of craft and form makes them comfortable moving between each category in complex and exciting ways as they incorporate surprising combinations of materials, processes, and other elements along the way.
Whether visually present in each work or not, the body is an important aspect to each artist and represented in a variety of ways - from image based representation to the evidence of physical actions, and our experience of scale. We see it as the actual form of the artwork in Pottinger’s pieces upon which narrative is built. In Meksin’s work we see it through representations but also through the material narrative of spandex, gauze, and other elements meant for stretching across and draping over the human form. Her stiffened fabrics create architectural elements like doors, and windows which refer to the scrims and screens of paint, as well as the ancient Egyptian use of false doors in tombs which allow the spirit to pass from our wolrd to the next. Rajendran uses the form of jeans as a symbol within her narrative, where the image and its meaning unite as it’s form acts as both the shape of the painting, and the scaffolding for meaning.
For each artist color is a necessity to their work. It is not something merely applied, it is embedded in the marks, materials, feelings, and gestures. It is imperative to the expression of each work, weaving it into their works as it is woven into our contemporary material and cultural world. Neon and metallic fabrics correspond to performance and dance and enclosure or architecture, while the gritty layers of collage and pastel create a depth of narrative found through the process of drawing itself. Citrus, tropical plants, spices and other elements of taste are brought out through their rich colors and soft forms.
Through the materials and imagery that each artist incorporates we see an elevation of materials and images of our everyday contemporary experience elevated and transformed into fine art materials in an exciting way. Making something as ubiquitous as Spandex, jeans, or recognizably collaged items feel unquestionably important, complex, and appropriate to our relationship with the stuff of life is an amazing feat which Meksin, Pottinger, and Rajendran accomplish with ease and bravado.
I’m so excited and grateful to be included in the Golden Foundation’s residency program in the summer of 2020! This is an extremely generous program and I cannot wait to experiment with new materials. Click the screen shot to see the websites of the artists listed.
Please help support our programming at Ortega y Gasset Projects. We are a nonprofit artist run gallery who needs to fundraise for our exhibition budget. These amazing emerging and established artists have generously donated artworks to help us meet our fundraising goals. It is such a privilege to be counted among such amazing artists in this auction for a great cause. Thank you to Eric Hibit for organizing this event.
It is a pleasure to be included in the annual regional exhibition at the gallery at Delaware County Community College in Media, Pa. This year the exhibition was juried by Jodi Throckmorton, the Contemporary Curator Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Review!
Click the image to find a review of Ghost Stories!
Ghost Stories presents Paris’ and Shetabi’s investigations into the inexplicable, the ghostly, and the ominous. Their works access viewers’ experiences of the familiar, transforming it into a haunting encounter. Norm Paris’ Monuments series of large-scale graphite drawings and plaster sculptures show the material and psychological making and unmaking of his subjects in ways which look to the past for glimpses into the future. Mark Shetabi’s sculptures based on movie theatres and hotel lobbies evoke a sense of a space that feels both distant and intimate as one discovers their eerie charms from a very close range. The play in both bodies of work between monumental and miniscule scale flips our expectations of things both epic and intimate.
Story and history converge and resurface as images and forms are unearthed through material processes, selected subjects, and obstructed views. Each artist’s work is alive and in a constant state of flux, where the viewer feels the residue of the artist’s process of making, unmaking, reframing, and editing.
Mark Shetabi (Philadelphia, PA) was born in New York, and as a child lived for five years in Tehran, Iran before his family returned to the United States in 1979, on the eve of the Iranian Revolution. The experience of straddling two cultures often in conflict is an enduring subtext for much of his work. Shetabi’s paintings and sculptures are made with the same materials and tools and as a result, share a skin. Through his work, Mark uses representations of familiar subjects to provide a visual access to a subjective and disjointed overview of Iranian and American histories, politics and possible futures.
Norm Paris (New York, NY) is an artist from Cleveland, Ohio. He creates sculptures, drawings, and mixed-media works that explore his complicated relationship to popular culture of the recent past, focusing on objects, iconography, and mythology that alternately aggrandize and diminish historical figures over time. Paris re-envisions once heroic figures as relics, ruins, and absences; these bygone icons—once-celebrated athletes and musicians sourced from a mix of personal and public mythologies—are used as vessels to be modeled, covered, crated, or redacted. He alternately renders and obscures his iconography through labor-intensive processes of drawing, casting, and erasure.
We would greatly appreciate your support through the purchase of a catalogue. It was generously designed by Peter Lusch, with thoughtful writings by myself and Julian Kreimer.
Our Catalogue!
Please consider supporting Ortega y Gasset Projects and this exhibition’s expenses by purchasing a catalogue!
"The Plant That Sold The World" 2016 Chris Bogia
Read MoreMark Martinez, 2017, Craving Inclusion Does Not Mean Sacrificing One’s Self, 48” x 32” acrylic and charcoal on t-shirt (from ongoing splayed t-shirt series)
Read MoreHere are install images from my first curated exhibition, titled Frame Work, at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY this summer. This exhibition includes Aubrey Levinthal, Kelly McRaven, Dustin Metz, Jason Mones, Jennifer Packer, Eleanor K. Ray, and George Rush.
Photos by Rob Ventura
AUBREY LEVINTHAL: Velvet Moon, oil on canvas, 22" x 18"
The act of painting a window-view is an unabashed celebration of the best of painting. Time, materiality, subjectivity, are all present within the narratives. There are few subjects more traditional to painting, and yet it has endless possibilities. A painting of a view outwards can carry with it a multitude of meaning, emotion, and visual/tactile pleasures. Most of all it is a dialogue with the practice of painting, image making, and our practice of painting on (for the most part) a window frame stretched with canvas.
Leon Battista Alberti asked his audience to perceive the painting, and its underlying structure, as a window itself. This 15th Century metaphor may seem antiquated, yet these artists show us that within this concept there is so much potential. Within Frame Work these settings range from those based on memory, to those directly observed, to inventions and reconstructions of ideal or imagined spaces.
Each artist works through this motif in order to dig deeper into their own practice. Kelly McRaven’s employs physical divisions as a way to use many styles or variations within one painting, while Jennifer Packer’s careful insertion of breath into each painting displays her touch and hints of air movement. Jennifer Packer employs narration in a figurative way, while George Rush implies it through much more subtle means. Dustin Metz and Aubrey Levinthal flirt with more gestural abstraction through their use of tactile experimentation and Eleanor K. Ray navigates memory through use of the grid and color to evoke light’s ethereal, emotional and temperature qualities.
When we approach a window and its frame, we look through rather than “at” it. The experience of a painting is a look into and through the surface, beyond the obvious, which allows for painterly metaphor, for any number of our experiences and reflections. These opportunities are what allow painting to transport us as artists and viewers. When looking “at” a painting one does not just look at the image, but into the painting – the surface, the actions and gestures of the painter – and into the content of the image and materials. The layers of space, textures, and framing are undeniably a painter’s language.
