Saturday, December 29, 2012

Blogged on COLOSSAL, Art and Visual Ingenuity

Christopher Jobson featured my Artforum Series on his smart and visually centric blog, COLOSSAL, Art and Visual Ingenuity. According to Christopher, "Colossal is a Webby-nominated blog that explores art, design, and photography, with a focus on work that is non-digital in nature," so it does not surprise me that my Artforum work, with it's tactile nature, caught his eye.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

MIAMI HIGHLIGHTS: BASEL AND AQUA

Miami Highlights: Basel and Aqua by 
New American Paintings
Eleanor Harwood Artists highlighted by
 New American Paintings Blog:
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Laura Paulini (NAP #85), Eleanor Harwood Gallery
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Laura Paulini, Eleanor Harwood Gallery
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Mel Davis (NAP #55), Eleanor Harwood Gallery
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Francesca Pastine (NAP #91), Eleanor Harwood Gallery
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Francesca Pastine, Eleanor Harwood Gallery
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Paul Wackers, Eleanor Harwood Gallery





























Monday, December 3, 2012

AQUA ART FAIR IN MIAMI


I will be participating at the Aqua Art Fair in Miami through Eleanor Harwood Gallery. She'll be in the largest booth on the second floor to the back of the hotel, Room 214. Come and visit us.

She has made a catalog of work presented in the fair. Be in touch for inquiries and higher resolution images if you are not able to attend. 
  
  

 
 
Aqua Art Miami 2012: Dec. 5th - December 9th 

Aqua 2012 Exhibiting Artists:
James Chronister, Mel Davis, Niall McClelland, Francesca Pastine, Laura Paulini, Jill Sylvia, Paul Wackers

Location:
1530 Collins Avenue (south of Lincoln Road) Miami Beach FL 33139

Schedule:

Wednesday,  December 5, 7:30 - 11pm
- VIP Preview Opening

Thursday, December 6, noon - 9pm
Friday, December 7, 11am - 9pm
Saturday, December 8, 11am - 9pm
Sunday, December 9, 11am - 4pm

For inquiries, e-mail eleanor@eleanorharwood.com, or call 415-867-7770  


___________________________________________________________

 
Aqua 2012 Exhibiting Artists 
   

James Chronister
  
James Chronister

As a group of work, Chronister's paintings work together with the loose over arching theme of appropriating mass images and channeling them through a hand made process; a human maker. The process includes starting with mechanically produced images and filtering them through the eye, hand and brain of the painter. Chronister likes to think of the paintings responding to one
another the way songs on an album might. Even if the paintings (songs) may appear dissimilar upon first strike, he strives for a unifying mood, approach and overall sensibility. Together, the paintings work with one another to create a more complex meaning. The disparate subjects stir deeper questions about their connection.

His use of color is also meticulously thought through with layers and layers of color creating the background "grey" in his paintings. When the paintings are seen as a group the backgrounds turn into a subtle color field series with the images in black carefully dotted on top of the various colored grounds. 

James Chronister is based in San Francisco. He grew up in Montana graduating from University of Montana with a BFA. He then moved to San Francisco where he earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2004. He received a SECA nomination from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and his work is in the collection of the Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, CA and in numerous private collections on both the East and West Coasts. He is the winner of the Richard K. Price Scholarship and the Lux Art Institute Residency award.
   

Mel Davis

Mel Davis

Davis had been working in color fields up until 2009 and the shift in her painting practice was prompted by a desire to apply new discoveries in her work.
Previously her monochromatic paintings achieved a singular tone; one that was concerned with wonder. With these new works, Davis strikes a multiplicity of
attitudes: fast, tender, sweeping and bold. Her approach looks effortless and is evidence of an artist in the studio experimenting and enjoying the pleasure of paint and the actual act of painting.

The pieces feel fresh and modern and quick. In actual fact Davis' painting are often worked on and amended numerous times in the months they are in the studio with constant refinement and small alterations slowly adding to the finished pieces.

Of her work she points to the poet Galway Kinnell discussing Walt Whitman's tendencies toward revision in his late poems. Kinnell states that Whitman loses the courage he had from when he was younger. That Whitman would take out the 5 lines that revealed an "inner experience", edited out the "things that are embarrassing to the self", concerned now in becoming the poet for the masses. Kinnell strives in his own poetry to put those 5 lines in. Leaving those 5 lines in is the task Davis sets for herself. Mel Davis is a Berkeley, California based visual artist. She grew up in MontrĂ©al, graduated from Concordia University in 1998, then moved to the Bay Area to complete her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. She is part of numerous private and public collections, some of which are Hyatt, Capitol Group and Wellington Management and she is the winner of The Canada Council For The Arts Grant and the Irene Pijoan Memorial award for Painting.

 


 
Francesca Pastine
  
Pastine is excited by the potential of material and its transformation through the process of handwork. Her work speaks to the physical act of the hand creating, not in the sense of 'gesture', but through intimate care and attentiveness to detail.

Pastine began using ARTFORUM magazines as a medium for her work in 2008. She considers her repurposed ARTFORUM magazines as unsolicited collaborations with the artist featured on their cover. The reconfigured magazines map out a tangle of associations, unique contradictions, and paradoxes that combine to imbue the inanimate object with emotional power.

Maintaining a strong connection to the physicality of drawing, her X-acto blade mimics a pencil, subtracting rather than adding. She eschews glue or other manipulations that change the inherent character of the magazines. In this way, they retain their association to what they are, carriers of information that have been handled, earmarked and scuffed over time.

Her newest body of work uses the same techniques but applied to mutual fund pages from the New York Times newspaper. With these she has created masks that have been cut and metal-leafed, dramatically transformed from their original shape. The forms suggest archeological curiosities from tribal sources, toying with our notions of antiquity and present-day meaning.
Francesca Pastine was born in New York City. She earned her BFA in 1993 and MFA in 1996 from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the winner of Kala Fellowship award and the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant, and has work in numerous private collections and the Kala Institute's Print Collection.
See available work by Francesca Pastine

 
Laura Paulini

Laura Paulini's paintings and drawings are created over long stretches of time, each stripe and each dot meticulously rendered by hand in multiple layers of
paint on panel or ink on paper. Due to the juxtaposition of minute changes in hue and value, the picture planes appear to vibrate. Waverings, absences, and misalignments in the mark-making contribute to an optical effect, while the simple, iconic, and symmetrical compositions retain a sense of stillness.

Exploring the tension between harmony and chaos, growth and decay, Paulini's work evokes imagery as varied as woven textiles, Braille lettering, and pixilated
graphics. Reviewers have consistently responded to this duality, most recently among them Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle who summed up Paulini's recent solo show, SHIMMER, at Eleanor Harwood Gallery this way: "In her painstaking
work, this East Bay painter goes hand to hand with the challenge posed by digital imaging to viewers remaining sensitive to the human touch." 

Paulini grew up in Wisconsin receiving a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Milwaukee, WI. She received her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA in 2005. She has shown extensively throughout the USA. Her work is included in prestigious private collections and the Juniper Networks Corporate Collection. She is a winner of the Jay DeFeo Prize, an SFMOMA SECA award nominee and a Kala Art Institute Artist-in-Residence Fellowship awardee.
 
 
  
Jill Sylvia
  
Jill Sylvia's work is made out of ledger sheets. These papers are traditionally used to record the financial transactions of a business or an individual, hosting the data necessary for accounting information to be compiled, and for analysis in
determining profit and loss. They are the material of economics.

In an attempt to understand our need to quantify transactions, Sylvia employs this paper. She uses a drafting knife to individually remove tens of thousands of boxes from this paper, leaving behind the lattice of the grid intended to separate the boxes. She involves herself in this routine of trying to make time and labor palpable while communicating its loss.The skeletal pages drape and accumulate, demarcate the time cost for their creation, and become the buildings for which they have laid the groundwork. In her other work, her "Reconstructions", grids are produced using the excised bits of paper in order to create a new sense, a new value. The boxes become the units of the picture plane, the medium of color fields. With each piece, the notion of "value" is called into question - be it the value of our quotidian pursuits, the relative value of labor, or the implicit values of economic advancement. 

Jill Sylvia grew up in Massachusetts. She received a BA from Bard College in New York in 2001 and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. Her work is in the de Young Museum's permanent collection, San Francisco, California, The Anderson Collection, San Francisco Bay Area, California, The Frankel Foundation for Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, The Fidelity Corporate Collection, Boston, Massachusetts and numerous other private collections.
See available work by Jill Sylvia 
 
   
Paul Wackers

Paul Wackers paints landscapes and still-lifes that are both familiar and alien. His paintings reinterpret and reorganize mundane reality into rich juxtapositions
of colors, objects, shapes, patterns, and structures. In Wackers' view, the works
"offer a glimpse into the way the world is constantly being reloaded with opportunities
and options for reinterpretations and impressions." His earlier work, although pattern rich, featured perhaps more recognizable elements and structures, while his current series of "still lives" are mashed-together amalgamations or arrangements of partially recognizable objects on shelves.

Wackers has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. He is the recipient of a SFMOMA SECA award nomination and a grant winner from the San Francisco Art Institute and the winner of the prestigious Tournesol award at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Wackers received his BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design in 2001 and his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. He is included in numerous private collection around the world. He lives and works in New York.
See available work by Paul Wackers 
 
  
Niall McClelland
 
For Niall McClelland working in black and grey scale allows the viewer to connect more easily with his process.  This transparency about the process, a system of mark making through folding and xeroxing, fosters an immediate connection between seeing and understanding, and evokes a kind of "back to basics" mentality about art making.  Stripped of embellishment, the simplicity and starkness of the work point to the truth behind any art piece - the hand of its maker.
 

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Review of Unsolicited in the Philadelphia Inquirer


Galleries: 'Outside of Time,' beautifully and mysteriously

November 25, 2012|By Edith Newhall, For The Inquirer





Not that Artforum magazine ever needed help with its design, but Francesca Pastine, a San Francisco artist who is having her first solo exhibition here, has made it even more visually absorbing by cutting shapes into issues of the famously thick and square glossy with an X-acto blade - an act she considers a kind of unsolicited collaboration with the magazine and the cover artists (Bridget Riley, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, and others). Pastine cuts at an angle, leaving the edges of pages, and any number of fleeting art-world trends, temptingly exposed. 

Francesca Pastine's "Artforum 45, Unsolicited Collaboration with Trisha Brown, Pour Series" (2012), at Pentimenti.
Francesca Pastine, Artforum 45, Pour Series, 2012











  

Pentimenti Gallery, 145 N. 2d St., 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays. www.pentimenti.com. or 215-625-9990. Through Dec. 15.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

REVIEW OF UNSOLICITED AT PENTIMENTI GALLERY

Here is another review in City Paper of my show Unsolicited:


Re-View

We check out the opulent “This is Elsewhere” at Pentimenti Gallery.

...[w]hile not exactly landscape, Tileston’s work undeniably has a spatial, topographic element, and Christine Pfister, who runs Pentimenti, has cleverly paired it with a sister show — “Unsolicited,” Francesca Pastine’s X-Acto dissections of contemporary-art periodical Artforum
Artforum, if you’re not familiar, is kind of like the art-world Vogue, in that its editorial pages of writing and photo spreads are at least matched in number by tons of gorgeous, luxe-y advertisements in brilliant colors. Pastine’s “excavations” take advantage of the magazine’s square format and high-production-value colors: She fans out pages beyond the glossy’s border and razors away some colored layers of pages to reveal others underneath. The thick, cut-paper layers, stacked into topographic masses, are a clear complement to Tileston’s paintings. 
Pastine’s cutaways interact with the magazines’ cover images, which the artist considers a “unsolicited collaboration” between herself, the magazine and the artist featured on the cover. Unlike the found-book interventions of Ishmael Randall Weeks, these works don’t feel like a meditation on geography, architecture, colonization or political space. Rather, Pastine’s altered magazines feel like a fun diorama/valentine to the art world — an externally localized topographic fun-fair that pairs well with Tileston’s introverted universes. 

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

PHILADELPHIA CITY PAPER REVIEW OF MY EXHIBIT

First Friday focus

City Paper's First Friday Hitlist

PENTIMENTI
Francesca Pastine destroys icons beautifully.
Since 2008, she’s been slicing and dicing her friends’ ARTFORUM magazines with an X-Acto knife.
“I was intrigued by their square format, particularly when the bloated art market was reflected in their one-inch thickness,” she says in an artist’s statement. “Starting with the covers, I cut, bend, manipulate, pull and dig my way through them, revealing a visceral topography of art trends.”
Her exhibit “Unsolicited” features seven ARTFORUM dissections, made of screws, wood and Plexiglas. 
Like any good provocateur, Pastine seems to respect her subject even as she pokes fun at it. She even talks about her artwork like it’s a partnership of sorts — an “unsolicited collaboration with the magazine and the cover artist.” Through Dec. 15, opening Fri., Nov. 2, 6 p.m., 145 N. Second St., 215-625-9990, pentimenti.com.

Monday, November 12, 2012

REBOUND - HALSEY INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Rebound

Dissections and Excavations in Book Art

EXHIBITING ARTISTS


May 23 – July 6, 2013

Rebound: Dissections and Excavations in Book Art brings together the work of five mixed media artists from around the world who sculpt, scrape, bend and carve to create astonishing compositions using books as a point of departure. Curated by Karen Ann Myers, Assistant Director of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, this exhibition features works by Brian Dettmer (Atlanta), Long-Bin Chen (Taiwanese, now living in New York), Guy Laramee (Montreal), Francesa Pastine (San Francisco), and Doug Beube (New York). Each of these artists transforms various types of literature and/or printed “books” through sculptural intervention. Despite the individualistic and exclusive perspective of each artist, they have remarkable connections in the themes and ideas they respectively mourn and celebrate.
For generations, our society has been lamenting the loss of natural beauty and the earth’s resources to the rising tide of industrial and technological “progress” towards greater efficiency and luxury. With this progression of technology, the relevance of physical books in our culture is diminishing. The tangible, permanent information presented in books is quickly being replaced with digital media and the Internet, which exemplify fluidity and constant change. Books as a vessel for accessible and easily communicated knowledge have become somewhat antiquated. In our ever-evolving digital present, we see a variety of once cherished technologies losing their importance and luster at an increasingly rapid rate.
From the confusion and sense of loss that emerge out of this condition, these artists have created their own responses. Some, like Laramee and Chen, directly address the parallel between the disappearance of natural spaces and books as an outdated mode of expression; carving landscapes from the pages and bindings. Deep crevasses, hidden caves, and awe-inspiring phenomena and landscapes emerge from chiseled pages. Alternately, some artists, like Pastine and Dettmer, seek to bring the books into the future, by digitizing or technologizing them. Here, images are created that are reminiscent of topographical or weather maps, readings from seismographs, or cross-sections of the “bodies” of the books. These works are treated as surgeries or dissections, as scalpels and needles are used to carve away the books’ exteriors.
Brian Dettmer’s precise excavation of books page by page focuses on taking something that already exists and exposing alternate histories and memories, which reveal new relationships. Long-Bin Chen combines the cultures of the East and West through the mixture of sculpture and literature. Through this, we are prompted to examine the eternal vexation of communication and the social relationship we have with books. Guy Laramee’s work plays heavily on the idea of erosion in that knowledge could very well be an erosive process rather than an accumulation. In that light, he brings up the human fascination with the content of consciousness. In turn, he examines not “what” we think about, but “that” we think. Through the glossy publication Art Forum, Francesca Pastine reveals the visceral topography of art trends through an unsolicited collaboration with the magazine and the cover artist. Doug Beube explores the book itself, a seemingly antiquated technology that is still purposeful in a digital age. He accepts its limited capacity as its personality flaw, but moreover its elegance.
In the face of unsettling changes, these artists appeal to a sense of monumentality in their work. The references to nature, religion, science or cultural complexity allude to the idea that only concepts of the greatest importance stand the test of time. Despite the emphasis on the precariousness of human invention, these works do not display a completely bleak outlook on society’s changes. The variety of color, form and openness of composition among the works also celebrate the ingenuity of creating something new from something old. The artworks simultaneously celebrate and forewarn the viewers of the fine line between monuments and ruins.

KNIGHTS ART REVIEW OF UNSOLICITED AT PENTIMENTI GALLERY


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Pentimenti Gallery in Old City has double the visual intensity throughout the month of November. On display right now is a two-person show by artists Francesca Pastine and Jackie Tileston that plays with colorful, fluid forms in both abstract painted manifestations and appropriated constructions made from physical art publications themselves.
Unsolicited Collaboration
Francesca Pastine, “Unsolicited Collaboration with Kara Walker, Artforum Excavation Series.”
Works by Pastine are immediately intriguing in that they are all (dis)assembled from used magazines. The artist utilizes X-acto knives to slice and reshape the recognizable objects of print publication from boxy pages to organic, dripping swaths of patterns. At a time when print is quickly fading into the background in favor of web-based publishing, these melting magazines make for an apt metaphor surrounding their own obsolescence. Furthermore, these books are not just any discarded Newsweek that Pastine found in her local dentist’s waiting room, they are her friend’s unwanted copies of Artforum. Morphing the very stuff of contemporary art and placing it squarely in a gallery is not just a nudge at paper production, but at the art world itself.
Artforum 45
Francesca Pastine, “Artforum 45.”
Cut paper allows for the inclusion of actual depth into these montages. The structures are more relief sculpture than collage, but they tug at the coattails of two-dimensional art as well, seeing as they are literally composed of flat images. Pastine plays with this element quite a bit, digging warped, rectangular pits into the cover of Artforum or layering the pages into bookmark-like blobs that peek out from inside the books. Particularly stunning is Pastine’s “Artforum 45,” which shows a group of white-clad bodies seemingly falling onto one of her contoured pools of color. The key word here is onto, and not into. The fact that the people rest atop the form instead of sink into it references its existence as a solid object and not just an amorphous puddle.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

NEW WORK

These are some of my new Artforum, Pour Series, work that will be featured at Pentimenti Gallery this November
 

Artforum 44, Unsolicited Collaboration with Michael Clark, Pour Series 2012


Artforum 43, Unsolicited Collaboration with Bridget Riley, Pour Series 2012 


Artforum 44, Unsolicited Collaboration with Trisha Brown, Pour Series 2012 


Artforum 46, Best of 2006, Pour Series 2012

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Fall 2012 Visiting Artist Lecture at SSU

Come by Sonoma State University to hear my talk if you're in the area this Monday, October 22 at noon.

Fall 2012 Visiting Artist Lecture Series

All lectures are free to the public and held at Sonoma State University in the Art Department. This semesters lectures will be held on Mondays (unless otherwise noted), Room 108 from Noon - 1:00pm.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

solo exhibition at Pentimenti Gallery















november 2 > december 15 | 2012

francesca pastine
u n s o l i c i t e d
works on paper


reception: november 2 | 5 > 8:30 pm

pentimenti 145 north second street | philadelphia pa 19106

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

ArtWalk Coalition for the Homeless Auction


If you're in New York on November 7, please support this great organization which helps the homeless in New York.  I am donating one of my Mutual Fund Spiderwebs to the auction.

(click on orange links for more information)





Many thanks to Art Enthusiast Blog

Many Thanks to Art Enthusiast Blog for review and pictures of , Unsolicitied, at Eleanor Harwood Gallery

Friday, September 21, 2012

This is How My Brain Works

Pictures of This is How My Brain Works at Radiator Gallery, Long Island City New York, courtesy of Michael Lee.









Wednesday, August 22, 2012

SFAQ Interview

Here is an interview with SFQA Arts and Culture magazine by Gregory Ito


Conversations with Kala Art Institute Fellows Part 1

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

EAST BAY EXPRESS REVIEWS KALA RESIDENCY PROJECTS EXHIBIT

Alex Bigman of the East Bay Express reviewed the Residency Projects exhibit at Kala Art Institute

The Post-Apocalyptic Worlds of Alison O.K. Frost, Vanessa Marsh, and Francesca Pastine 

Three artists make bold, doomsday-tinged work at Kala Art Institute.


In the stereopsis test for depth perception, one stares at an apparently random jumble of dots until, all of a sudden, select visual fragments coalesce into a defined shape that then, miraculously, detaches itself from the page.
Such was my experience at the Kala Art Institute's sprawling Residency Projects, the culminating exhibition of work by nine jury-selected fellows. Impressive across the board, the 38 works on display range from the super-minimal, as with Seth Koen's barely-there forms embossed in white paper, to the profuse, as with Lauren Rice's large-scale mixed-media collages.
The show privileges no particular point of entry and promises no overarching coherence. Yet, standing back and taking in the whole, three thematically in-sync artists seemed to link arms and step forward from the rest. The work of Alison O.K. Frost, Vanessa Marsh, and Francesca Pastine makes for a brilliant exhibition, in and of itself.
"Post-apocalyptic" seems an apt, if slightly too sensational, way of describing the shared undercurrent here. Frost and Marsh, at least, do not shy away from the word. "I've always had a strange sense of dread or anxiety of a pending environmental doom," said Marsh. "For many (possibly all) people, seemingly opposite urges to insulate and self-destruct exist as driving forces on a personal level, so that pictures of an end of the world as we know it can stand in for the sort of day-to-day 'micro-apocalypse' that we create in our own lives," added Frost. The two artists had never met until midway through their residencies.
To produce her eerie, dreamlike landscapes, Marsh uses an innovative photogram process, in which she layers acetate drawings of West Coast geography and scale models of people, trains, and other objects upon light-sensitive paper, exposing the scene to light at intervals. In effect, things that would normally be lit — radio towers, street lamps — remain dark, while an inexplicable hazy glow emanates from the terrain. Stiff figures, often lugging baggage of some kind, contemplate what feels very much like an aftermath.
Frost's sketches, etchings, and engravings picture nuclear anxiety with a similar serenity, even playfulness. In her DeLillo-esque "HazMat Choir," a rapturous congregation sings in anti-radiation suits. Elsewhere, a cabin rests idyllically in the shadow of power plant cooling towers; or, festive party flags deck out what is titled "Chernobyl Theme Park."
Meanwhile, Pastine's sculptures and accompanying ink-print photographs depict striking tribal masks that, upon close inspection, turn out to be fashioned from pages of The New York Times' stock market gauge. This smart, metaphorically loaded gesture (financial speculation as pagan ritualism, The New York Times as cultural totem) warrants a review of its own. In concert with the post-apocalyptic voices of Marsh and Frost, however, the masks emphasize another reading — as anthropological discoveries to be made by future humans, who will contemplate in softly lit wonder the mysterious relics of our own, long-since-extinguished civilization.
Residency Projects runs through September 15 at Kala Art Institute (2990 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley). 510-841-7000 or Kala.org

Friday, August 10, 2012

THIS IS HOW MY BRAIN WORKS exhibit at Radiator Gallery

 

This is How My Brain Works


Donovan Barrow, Brian Belott, Natasha Bowdoin, Max Clarke, Floto+Warner, Sara Klar, Todd Knopke, Michael Lee, Elisa Lendvay, Abraham McNally, Andrew Mount, Ryan Sarah Murphy, Francesca Pastine, Javier Pinon, Leslie Siegel

Curated by Michael Lee

September 7 – 30, 2012

Radiator Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of its sixth show This Is How My Brain Works, a group exhibition that inaugurates the gallery’s second season.  With over 30 works made by sixteen artists, the show examines the practice of collage through its many iterations and permutations ranging from works on paper to artist books, photographs, sculpture, textiles, digital projections and video.  Through the presentation of visually diverse but not conceptually disparate works, the show helps define collage as both a working method still robust at the turn of the 21 century but more importantly as a manner of processing information either willfully or uncontrollably.  The show’s title is a comical send-up of the precognitive jumble that is the necessary basis for the eventual creation of meaningful logic in the human brain.

Whether culled from magazine pages, scavenged from a neighbor’s recycling bin, plucked from the uncharted corners of the internet--or the physical corner of an urban street—this group of artists shares a love for material with a history.  It can be cultural memory, what artist Christian Marclay describes as the “recognition of the source material with the pleasurable violence of transformation”, or it can manifest itself in the physical wear objects undergo with the passing of time.  Whatever the case, the audience’s synapses begin to fire upon seeing this new/old thing well before a fully formed idea congeals in their heads.  This is what all art is about.  Collage highlights this fact.

The current generation of collage and assemblage artists is conversant in the standard and accepted history of the form as modernist paradigm par excellence.  While this history obviously informs artists in this show, they have an advantage over their predecessors in contextualizing this working method as pre-modern far more easily due simply to their place in time.  The palimpsests of ancient cities and the collage roots of film projection start to seem much closer when looked at from this perspective. What was once considered an artistic reaction to the specific age of communication can be seen in retrospect as a responsive method to connect art and the world in any age. 

Michael Lee is an artist and teacher. This is his first curatorial effort. He was awarded a residency at Cooper Union in 2005 and at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Studio in 2008. Michael earned a BFA in art history from The University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in painting from Hunter College in New York. 

A catalogue will be published in conjunction with This Is How My Brain Works.  Please also find related events and documentation at www.radiatorarts.com.  For more information and images, email info@radiatorarts.com or call 347 677 3418.

A newcomer to the burgeoning art scene surrounding MoMA PS 1 in Long Island City, Queens, Radiator Arts was started by Tamas Veszi in 2011 as a venue dedicated to giving independent curators and artist-curators access to space and providing an opportunity to strengthen the vital artist community of north Brooklyn and western Queens. 




Radiator Gallery
10-61 Jackson Ave
Long Island City, NY

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Art Enthusiast

The Art Enthusiast visits the Kala Fellowship exhibition-- check it out :)

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Eleanor Harwood Gallery On-line Store!

check out Eleanor Harwood Gallery's on line store

Last Week of Unsolicited

 ::Unsolicited:: closes on July 7 so you have another week to catch it if you missed it.  Here are some creative photos of the show by Alexis Immarino.  The show is at Eleanor Harwood Gallery