Delaware Art Shows- “Fissures in the Frame” at The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington
Dec 192024
 

Lillian Bayley Hoover, “a planet swayed by breath”, 2024, oil on Dibond panel

Lillian Bayley Hoover, “a planet swayed by breath”, 2024, oil on Dibond panel (detail)

Marion Fink, “A mountain top full of achievements-a woman thinking of the sea.”, 2022, monotype, oil color and wax pastel on paper (left) and Lillian Bayley Hoover “here, witnessing now”, 2021, oil and pastel pencil on Dibond panel (right)

Marion Fink, “Night Sky Dreamer”, 2022, monotype, oil color and wax pastel on paper

Lillian Bayley Hoover, “the grass still sings”, 2019, acrylic and oil on Dibond panel, and “no ruined stones”, 2020, oil on Dibond panel

Teresa Shields, “Trending Threads”, 2016-17, embroidered felt and wool letter blocks, wood

Part of The Delaware Contemporary’s series of exhibitions exploring the intersection of art and design, Fissures in the Frame presents work from three artists- Marion Fink, Lillian Bayley Hoover, and Teresa Shields.

From the museum-

Although technology has increased the ease and availability of interaction, human connection has arguably become more difficult. Our daily lives have become reliant on those systems that enable, and even promote, us to interact. Modes of interchange have become more mediated; physical spaces and resources are afforded to those with access, while digital realms are accessible, but commandeer attention away to fabricated unrealities. The undercurrents of which reveal cracks; and fractured existences due to disconnect. Marion Fink, Lillian Bayley Hoover, and Teresa Shields probe these fissures, unveiling their nuance and paradox.

Marion Fink creates layered, large-scale monotype portraits that are rich with narrative elements in surrealistic settings. Raised in the early years of the digital age, Fink’s portraits allude to moments of fragmented realities; the paradox of actual, lived experiences conflated with their existence through the internet. Figures are isolated within fabricated spaces, revealing the parallels between emotion and circumstance. Fink beautifully captures these moments through competing perspectives and complex feelings.

Lillian Bayley Hoover paints landscapes that reveal features realistically while omitting others. These visual fissures that bar the viewer from accessing the remaining painting reflect the perceived separation between nature and the “human world”; one that frequently feels disconnected even though we are all of one world. Hoover investigates how nature is a witness to human life; the designed spaces that shape our world, but also those that we have inherited and how nature acts as a historical record of us.

Multimedia artist, Teresa Shields, presents an interactive installation consisting of 140 individual wooden panels that represent the maximum characters of a post on X (formerly a Tweet on Twitter) and are meant to be moved to form a message. Shields explores our relationship with language; the contradiction between the immediacy of a digital post versus that of a physically crafted message. The activity is simple but offers the opportunity to slow down, collaborate with others, and make new meanings entirely.

This exhibition closes 12/29/24.

California Art Flashback-Jessie Homer French at Palm Springs Art Museum

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Collage, Conceptual Art, Fiber Arts, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Palm Springs, Sculptors / Sculpture
Aug 022024
 

The above image is of Jessie Homer French’s  Mapestry California 2012, 2012 (fabric, thread, fabric paint, and pen), which was on view in 2018 at Palm Springs Art Museum.

From the museum about the work-

This work is from a series of “mapestries” that the artist made between 2012-2017. These textile works graphically map out natural elements and forces in California, from prominent flora and fauna, natural monuments and mountain ranges, as well as hidden fault lines that spur the earthquakes that constantly threaten the region and its inhabitants. The work reflects the artist’s hyperawareness of the environment around her. Their flat, graphic qualities are similar in form to the artist’s paintings. The mapestries were made specifically for Californians, as artworks that could do no harm hanging over one’s bed in case of an earthquake.

One of her paintings is currently part of the benefit exhibition Art for a Safe and Healthy California at Gagosian Beverly Hills. The exhibition, presented by Jane Fonda, along with the gallery, is raising money to protect communities from toxic oil drilling.

NYC Art Shows- Leslie Wayne at Jack Shainman Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Aug 012024
 


Jack Shainman Gallery is currently showing two bodies of work by Leslie Wayne for her exhibition This Land.  One half of the show is paintings based on photos she took of landscapes from an airplane window while traveling from New York to the Seattle. Abstract work influenced by aspects of the natural world makes up the other half.

In a recent interview with designboom, Wayne was asked how perception and memory influenced her process for this work-

Perception is just an interpretation really, of what one sees, and while the paintings in ‘This Land is Your Land’ series were made directly from the photographs I took on a flight to the Pacific Northwest, they are infused with the feelings and memories I hold dear of my childhood. I’ve lived in New York since 1982, but I grew up in California and I still have a very strong attachment to the West Coast and to the geology and geography of the West. Even the abstract work in which I am manipulating thick layers of paint, I am drawing on those sensations I remember having of being in nature where the tectonic and geologic forces are right there for one to see and feel — millions of years of layered strata, of compression and subduction, of gravity and erosion, and certainly of the shifting plates that cause earthquakes.

More on the show from the press release-

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present This Land, an exhibition of two kindred bodies of work by Leslie Wayne that express the nature of the American West through perception and memory. In each piece, Wayne considers different ways in which we interpret and imagine geological space, exploring landscape both as a vertical, abstracted force and a horizontal, figurative expanse. Named in homage to Woody Guthrie’s heartland ballad “This Land is Your Land,” Wayne offers a contemporary vision of Manifest Destiny—imbuing her symbolic, and experienced, westward voyages with topographies that are sensorial, memorial, and tectonic.

In a series of dimensional abstract paintings on large, metronome-like planks, Wayne uses a dramatic and vibrant palette to mold paint so that it cascades down the wood panel in a multitude of ways. Applying the paint in heavy layers, she encourages the influence of gravity and refines her materials to their most basic form, color, and behavior. Adopting, rather than controlling the rhythm of nature, these compositions are fluid to the viewer’s myriad associations with this image of momentum—be it reminiscent of the rush of an avalanche, the swell of hot lava, or the pileup of driftwood on a seashore.

In her series entitled This Land is Your Land, she creates compact, observational paintings based on snapshots she took from her seat as she flew west over the Rocky Mountains all the way to the Cascade Range in Washington State in 2021. Creating a precise mise-en-scène by placing each painting in a frame that resembles the Boeing 737 window she peered out from, Wayne transports her viewers into a precise sensation: beholding our nation as the land settles into one continuous, harmonious expanse—stripped down to simple shapes and shades. Her portholes offer a view into a terrain of awe, reminiscence, and omniscience, a collective vision of a region fraught with, and fractured by, territories and borders.

Extending beyond the format of the airplane-window frame, Wayne has also created two unique works inspired by the same journey. The first is a twenty-two-foot-long painted scroll entitled From the Rockies to the Cascades, in addition to High Dive, a large-format painting in which she stretches her canvas onto a frame of coiled springs—materials that simulate a bird’s-eye view of the landscape as if seen by a skydiver descending towards a trampoline. The paintings from this series are accompanied by a vitrine displaying Wayne’s special limited edition This Land, a handmade accordion book that illustrates the aerial photographs from her voyage, alongside Taylor Brorby’s poem “The Ages Have Been at Work” and the lyrics to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”

In German, heimat is a term used to describe not only the characteristics of a place, but the complex and interdependent physical, social, and mental associations with a homeland. For Wayne, this sentiment stretches, folds, and bends from the west coast, her childhood home, to the east coast, where she has resided since 1982. Treading across this land, psychic routes unfold, and Wayne savors “That path [which] is never straight and always various, each time opening new ways of seeing and thinking about the world we occupy, the ways we inhabit nature, and the legacies we leave behind.”

This exhibition closes 8/2/24.

A Collaborative Gallery Exhibition- “small_bars: To Activate a Landscape”

 Art, Artists, Ohio Art Shows, Performance Art, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sound Art
Jul 242024
 

The artists who make up small_bars, (Ry McCullough and Nick Satinover), are looking for participants for their new collaborative project– small_bars: To Activate A Landscape. Throughout July they are posting pairs of instructions, like the two above. You can choose to do any (or all) of the activities, in any order.

All contributions will be included and credited in a gallery exhibition at the Farmer Family Gallery at Ohio State University-Lima this August through October 2024, as well as the online archive of the project, and a small_bars printed publication.

Head over to their Instagram page to see all the different activities. Follow them to see what comes next, and send your submissions!

 

NYC Art Shows- Eva Struble at Jane Lombard Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jun 222024
 

Eva Struble has created gorgeous worlds for her exhibition Gravity of Small Things at Jane Lombard Gallery. The paintings shift from abstract to realistic and back again as bits of the natural landscapes emerge.

From the press release-

Through painting and textile, Struble explores the concept of embodiment in the landscape, relating the physical act of making to her multi-sensory and visionary experience of place. Contemplating the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature, the works collectively take into consideration our changing environment.

Struble’s paintings distill her physical experience of nature – the sharp touch of Yucca on her local hikes, the early morning smell of the Chaparral, or the disorientation of floating above seagrass in the ocean. Orchestrating a suite of visual constructs, the artist oscillates between chance and control while experimenting with pigments, media, layering, and collaging. Her work suggests a reflective yet speculative vision teeming with biodiversity and notions of cohabitation between species without interference.

The eponymous painting Gravity of Small Things effortlessly blends hazy nostalgia with honest representation and creative world-building. Sharp and soft edges intermingle in shallow focus as the viewer moves through silhouetted trees and gradient purple obstructions flecked with blue and red confetti-like marks. The landscape is at once familiar and remote, existing outside of conventional constructs of time and space. Recognizable elements break up the variegated ecosystem, playing with our perception to reveal effects similar to sunlight illuminating the changing leaves or the sparkle of reflections dancing on the surface of the water.

Snapshots of landscapes morph into organic forms as Struble reconciles her visual and corporeal memories of nature with her own body’s shapes, twists, and turns. In Malajon, layered washes of vibrant greens, blues, and pinks blend together to create a dynamic composition of varying depths, engaging our collective visual memory to suggest the ethereal entrance to an untouched cave, or perhaps a quiet adventure amidst jungle flora. As deliberate as it is exploratory, the artist’s otherworldly painterly manipulation gradually gives way to lend a semblance of reality to the abstracted composition. Drawing upon the viewer’s own experiences to evoke imaginative reflection, Struble’s works straddle the line between the human and natural worlds, simultaneously pushing and pulling to suggest alternative ways of coexisting.

This exhibition closes 6/22/24.

NYC Art Shows- Lucas Arruda at David Zwirner

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jun 132024
 

Lucas Arruda’s paintings for Assum Preto at David Zwirner capture moments in time that beckon you to look closer. On his Instagram is a photo of Agnes Varda with a quote that reads “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes”. Standing in front of these paintings allows the viewer to contemplate Arruda’s inner landscapes as well as their own.

From the gallery-

“Assum Preto” continues Arruda’s investigations into the painted medium and its ability to serve as an evocative and transcendental conduit for the unveiling of light, memory, and emotion. The exhibition is titled after a species of blackbird native to eastern Brazil—whose mundane birdsong, according to local tradition, is said to transform into a beautiful melody if the bird’s eyesight has been shaded. As the artist explains: “It’s as if, when the bird has everything in sight, and is full of information and distractions, it can’t organize itself. Only when it’s no longer surrounded by images, can it organize everything in its head. In a certain way, I think this has to do with light.… For me, light is related to remembering.” In the works on view, light takes on a multitude of forms, surfacing in various physical, ideographical, and affective manifestations.

The exhibition is primarily composed of new paintings from Arruda’s established body of seascapes, junglescapes, and abstract monochromes; together, these works bring about a complex understanding of landscape as a product of a state of mind rather than a depiction of reality. The works on view are notable for their fogged colors—exploring subtle but intricate variations within a single hue—that range from dense reds to ethereal and almost intangible veils of white. For the monochromes, Arruda adds layer upon layer of pigment to pre-dyed raw canvas in an attempt to replicate its tinted hue in paint, methodically returning to each work for weeks or even months on end until the composition slowly builds into a hazy and ever-shifting wall of light.



The seascapes and junglescapes, on the other hand, are made on prepared surfaces using a reductive process whereby the impression of light is attained through the subtraction of pigment. Devoid of specific reference points, Arruda’s seascapes are all grounded only by their thin horizon lines. Above and below this border, charged atmospheric conditions engage further dichotomies between sky and earth, the nebulous and the solid, the psychic and the visual. The jungles, by contrast, dwell in verticality; their genesis lies in the artist’s formative memories of the verdant foliage outside his bedroom window. For Arruda, the quasi-mythical scenery of the Brazilian rainforest coaxes out tensions between reality and human imagination. Towering and impenetrable, yet containing a sense of the infinite that surpasses its physical bounds, in Arruda’s work the jungle becomes a site of power and enlightenment as much as it is a harbinger of darkness and uncertainty—a place where one can be lost to the world and find themselves again.

As curator Lilian Tone writes: “[Arruda’s] paintings suggest a tenuous, fugitive, and mediated relation to nature as that which informs an aesthetic language. As viewers, we tend to make sense of the slightest mark within an open field, to immediately perceive a horizontal line as a horizon line, to create clouds from a change in direction of brushstrokes, and to perceive ground from a thick impasto. Arruda makes paintings we experience as at once beyond abstraction and yet before representation.”



In “Assum Preto”, Arruda debuts a group of small-scale, semi-abstract paintings that are constructed from a lexicon of symbolist motifs, marking a new turn in the artist’s practice while also harking back to the planar and architectonic forms that characterize his early oeuvre. In these works, he takes visual cues from the geometries and rich colorscapes found in the Brazilian modernist paintings of José Pancetti (1902–1958), Alfredo Volpi (1896–1988), and Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato (1900–1995). Arruda handles his brush lightly but with intense control, creating clouds and thickets of markings that delicately carve through the painted surface of the canvas in a manner recalling the textures and physicality of intaglio printmaking processes. Potent and open-ended, the symbols and motifs that populate these compositions—darkly brewing storms, empty canoes, and strings of outdoor lights—visualize the themes that permeate Arruda’s body of paintings, including the artist’s own dreams, experiences, and intuitions, through the lens of the sacred and the surreal. The images shift in and out of focus, as if hovering at the precipice of memory itself.

Additionally featured is an example of Arruda’s site-specific light installations. These works comprise a pair of vertically balanced rectangles rendered directly on the gallery wall—the top one created through a light projection and the bottom one physically applied with paint—thus translating the genre of landscape into its most elemental form.

This exhibition closes 6/15/24.

NYC Art Shows- Kazuyuki Takezaki at 47 Canal

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jun 072024
 

For Kazuyuki Takezaki’s exhibition Before Spring at 47 Canal, he presents distinctive versions of the landscape around his home in Marugame,  Japan.

The press release provides more detail-

…His current painting practice is deeply informed by the landscape around Marugame, with its plains ringed by low mountains in the distance. Often employing a grayish, chalky palette highlighted by blushes of orange shading into purple or white, he paints studies of plant life or mountain ridges as quickly rendered silhouettes that evoke miniature frescoes. In another body of work, he attaches canvas to a board and then sets out in his van to find a spot in the countryside, where he records his impressions in situ using oil stick. Comparing this practice to old men playing board games outdoors, he often spends several days on these “Board/Table” pieces, trying to keep up with the atmospheric conditions as they change hour by hour and day by day.

Both the canvases and the “Board/Table” pieces retain an element of the windowness of the earlier works in allowing for a coexistence of transparency and opacity. “At dusk, I often see the town horizontally divided into upper and lower halves by transparent and opaque color,”
Takezaki writes. Sometimes the sky looks like “solid gouache” while the town and trees are shot through with light, while at other times it’s the sky that takes on “a deeply transparent color” against the dark shadow of the town. The bands of color that occasionally bisect the small canvases at odd places, suggesting a horizon line but also arbitrary erasures, allude to this effect. They also come, Takezaki says, from a desire to work with multiple images at the same time. In a sense his works replicate the visual noise that accumulates on the surface of a window—replicate the agency of the window itself in simultaneously framing and interfering with the view.

But there is also a subtext to the works that pushes them beyond the tradition of the landscape-ranging from literati ink scrolls to amateur Sunday paintings and everything in between—into something that feels urgent and timely. According to Takezaki, the land around Marugame is dying. He can see it clearly in the sprawl being constructed in the plains, which drives away animal life, and the effects of fertilizer and other chemicals on the vegetation. The immediacy he strives for in his paintings—the way he tries to take everything all in at once, including the particles in the air and the brilliant light that illuminates the trees at dusk—is also an act of bearing witness to nature as a liminal zone between the worlds of the living and the dead. Communicating a profound yet fleeting sense of place, Takezaki’s windows onto this constantly shifting environment are also reflections on time, memory, and the porous overlaps between subject and object.

This exhibition closes 6/8/24.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Jane Freilicher at Kasmin Gallery in 2023

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Mar 152024
 

“Northern Lights”, 1959, oil on linen

“Untitled (Near the Cove)”, c. 1958, oil on linen

“Fresh Air”, c.1958-1962, oil on canvas

Although better known for her figurative paintings, Jane Freilicher also created several large abstract paintings which were on view last year at Kasmin gallery in NYC.  The paintings hint at a recognizable landscape, but through her use of color and energetic brush strokes she evokes the feeling of being immersed in the beauty of nature- without the boundaries of a more realistic representation.

From the gallery about the work-

The exhibition presents a group of paintings in degrees of abstraction, realized by Freilicher between 1958 and 1962, a period of great inventiveness when the artist was spending stretches of time in Long Island but had yet to establish a studio there. The series marks a crucial moment of discovery and focus for Freilicher, who went on to integrate the freedom, fluidity, and confidence developed during this period into her more recognizable still lifes and landscapes of later decades.

Freilicher’s abstractions have their roots in observation, informed by her studies with legendary abstract painter Hans Hofmann at his schools in New York and Provincetown. In this group of paintings, pastoral landscapes from Water Mill, Long Island, are translated through the lens of the artist’s memory into confident gestural compositions defined by their use of color and sensitive depiction of light. In a 2006 interview for The New York Sun, the artist tells writer Jennifer Samet of this evolutionary moment in her practice: “I remember being overwhelmed by aqueous light and the obliteration of the horizon by fog.” Freilicher’s palette returns repeatedly here to a combination of off-white and light blue, rendered in loose brushwork across an expansive pictorial space to give a palpable impression of the airy, open landscape of the country.

Breaking out of the domestic scale necessitated by previous studio spaces, this generative period saw Freilicher regularly visiting Water Mill and then returning to her Manhattan studio where she would collapse the formal elements of the rural and coastal environments into energetic, improvisational paintings that were significantly larger than her earlier works. While approaching pure abstraction, the paintings from this period retain a compositional recognition of their ordering principles—the horizon line, a boat’s mast, the position of the sun in the sky, and, in the artist’s words, “long vistas of clouds and water.”

The metamorphosis of landscapes that figure prominently in the artist’s life are representative of, as Roberta Smith identified in 2006, “a more personal, grounded version of Color Field painting.” This observation bridges Freilicher to a loose group of contemporaries whose considerations of their immediate environments brought great warmth and aliveness to varying shades of abstraction—Milton Avery, Etel Adnan, Joan Mitchell, Agnes Martin, and Willem de Kooning (whose own abstract landscapes inspired by his time on Long Island went on view at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1959).