Kadar Brock in NYTimes

In Miami, the Art World Takes a Shine to Bowery Gallerist Kathy Grayson

By DANNY GOLD, East Village

At an opening at The Hole this evening, Lola Montes Schnabel (daughter of artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel) will present what’s described as her first solo painting exhibition in the United States, “Love Before Intimacy.” Earlier this month, Danny Gold, a contributor to The Local, followed The Hole’s charismatic founder, Kathy Grayson, as she showed off Ms. Schnabel’s paintings at the N.A.D.A Art Fair in Miami Beach.

While the big-money crowd flocked to Art Basel in Miami Beach earlier this month, a crew of downtown New York upstarts gravitated toward a younger alternative. At the N.A.D.A. Art Fair, the names on the gallery walls weren’t as well known, but the faces were familiar to anyone who had spent a good amount of time at Max Fish. (The art bar on Ludlow Street is just a handful of blocks from The New Art Dealers Alliance’s offices on Chrystie Street.)

Kathy Grayson, 31, owner of the Hole, was one such familiar face. Her gallery at 312 Bowery leads the pack of D.I.Y. art spaces that have recently opened up downtown. Raised in Washington, D.C., the Dartmouth graduate got her start as a receptionist at Deitch Projects, a duo of SoHo spaces that were among the most influential galleries of the last decade.

After Jeffrey Deitch left Manhattan to run the M.O.C.A. in Los Angeles, Ms. Grayson set off on her own. Her new gallery has hosted an impressive array of up-and-coming artists as well as its share of debaucherous opening parties.

N.A.D.A. was no different: Ms. Grayson produced four big events during the long weekend, and sold art out of two identical booths staffed by Dee and Ricky Jackson, the wunderkind designers for Marc Jacobs who happen to be twins. The name of the stands? “Déjà-Booth.“

During the fair’s opening night, Ms. Grayson played hostess at the Delano Hotel. As well-to-do Europeans wearing scarves and linen shirts unbuttoned to the navel dined at the gorgeous hotel’s restaurant, New York City’s art kids took advantage of free scotch and sake just 150 feet away. A duo of strippers gyrated topless in the pool as ambient-rap group Salem (a favorite of Ms. Grayson’s) played to the accompaniment of a smoke machine and Klieg lights.

“The Delano was great,” she said the next day. “Everyone ended up making out with each other.”

Ms. Grayson spent the evening surrounded by her brain trust. Her entourage included model and former Hole intern May Anderson, who helped build the gallery with director of operations Jorge Ulrich, a fellow East Villager best known for curating the public art wall on Houston Street and Bowery. Also on the scene: Hearst heiress Fabiola Beracasa, the Hole’s creative director.

The after party was back at a house Ms. Grayson had rented for the week. She got just two hours of sleep before she was back to the grind.

“It’s fun if you don’t get tired,” she said. “When it starts to suck, yeah, it can be tiring: having the same conversation 400 times – who said what, what their second wife’s name is. It’s good, though – much better than nobody talking to you at all.”

That night, the Hole hosted a screening for the street artist Neckface at the Gusman Theater. A thousand people crowded into the elegant baroque venue to watch a four-minute film in which a kung fu fight ended in a woman’s gruesome decapitation. After another set from Salem, the British artist Matthew Stone closed with a DJ set heavy on Rihanna.

The rest of the week, Ms. Grayson’s maintained a hectic schedule: There was a dinner at the Mondrian with the C.E.O. of the Morgans Hotel Group to celebrate Mr. Stone’s sculptures by the pool, and a Playboy party at the Dream Hotel for artist Kembra Pfahler. There, nude women painted like aliens sang over subdued beats. One of them smashed a cake with her buttocks and the others feasted. The crowd – a mix of Miami club-goers, downtown kids, and visiting Europeans – cheered with equal parts approval and confusion.

After the set, when told a painting by one of her former artists had sold for $150,000, Ms. Grayson replied, “Oh God, anything else – let’s talk about today, tomorrow but not money. Please.” With that she laughed, then gulped down half of her drink.

“I should be tired,” she said. “But I’m not. We’ve had such a great week.”

Ms. Grayson started out as an artist, but found that her friends in the industry lacked the skills necessary to sell their own work. She found a calling promoting them, writing about them, and eventually curating their work at Deitch Projects.

During the eight years she served as director, she brought artists like Dan Colen, Terence Koh, and the late Dash Snow into the public eye. It was she who curated the notorious “Nest” installation, for which Mr. Snow and Mr. Colen cut up hundreds of phone books to simulate a hamster’s cage and then did drugs until they felt like hamsters themselves.

Deitch’s reputation and deep pockets gave her freedom. She said, “With Deitch, I could say, ‘I want to do a one-night exhibition for Terence Koh. I need $100,000,’ and it could happen.”

At her own gallery, she remains focused on pushing boundaries and supporting the community of artists, musicians and designers around her. In Miami, her twin booths showed two paintings by Lola Montes Schnabel, daughter of artist Julian.

“She’s never had a solo show,” said Ms. Grayson. “One sold for $25,000; the other was put on hold by a to-remain-nameless celebrity.”

The Hole also sold works in the sub-$50,000 range by a half-dozen artists, including several by Mr. Stone, who had a well-received show at the Bowery gallery earlier this month, and others by Kadar Brock, a graduate of Cooper Union.

“We could have sold 15 of Brock’s works,” said Ms. Grayson. Not bad for a gallery that opened last March with a show curated by streetwear icons Alife, featuring what might have been the first ever work of art by a bar (Max Fish offered a $7,000 table).

“It’s really hard to constantly be finding out what’s going on,” Ms. Grayson said. “You really have to live the life.”

Tonight at the Hole, she’ll host an opening party for a new show with Lola Schnabel and some abstract painters. A text invite to the opening read: “Both of thse shows are killer. I can’t wait for everyone to see!!”

Dave Thomas at The Gallery in Boise, Idaho

Lisa Adams at CB1- in Art Knowledge News

Los Angeles, California.- CB1 Gallery is pleased to present "Paradise Notwithstanding", new paintings by Lisa Adams, on view at the gallery through January 15th 2012. This is Lisa Adams’ first exhibition. Lisa Adams’ new paintings continue her exploration of two worlds, that of decay and that of possibility. The place that she conjures through this juxtaposition is one that comes to terms with the coexistence of the real and the ideal. “It’s a vision of imperfection’s guiding light,” says the artist. Just as decay and possibility come together in Lisa Adams’ work for "Paradise Notwithstanding", the new paintings are completely fluent in both the language of abstraction and of representation. This balance, and tension, leads viewers to explore the varied possibilities within each work, with visual iconography including water features, flora elements, atmospheric texture, and color fields.

In writing about her new work, Adams says: “Though the paintings could be viewed as a puzzle, I’d rather think of them as a collection of elements that foster our ability to trust a sense of place in the world while they encourage us to question reality. I’m not interested in beauty or non-beauty, hence the title Paradise Notwithstanding. I’m interested in the complexity that won’t allow me to define what I’m looking at, and to establish a narrative; a narrative that’s shy and hidden from view and with time unpacks itself. In my paradise, I see too much. I’m aware of the past, present and future all at once. I can see underneath and behind solid objects. It’s a skill not unique to me but one that most do not care to employ because it’s too demanding and too isolating. Then what’s the attraction? I have to think that it’s a full display of life on life’s terms. It’s all the undesirable stuff and all the great stuff mixed up together. It’s not a visual world of our choosing per se but rather one that we’ve been dealt.”

Lisa Adams is a painter and public artist with more than 30 years of continuous studio practice, and has a B.A. from Scripps College and an M.F.A. from the Claremont Graduate University. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and has been an artist-in-resident in Slovenia, Finland, Holland, Japan and Costa Rica. Her many accomplishments include a Fulbright Professional Scholar Award, and her work is in the public collections of Eli Broad, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, the Laguna Museum of Art and the Edward Albee Foundation. Lisa’s first monograph book, Vicissitude of Circumstance, published by ZERO+ Publishing was released in Fall 2011. She currently blogs on Los Angeles art for the Huffington Post.

Matt Jones & Kadar Brock in "..." at The HOle in NYC

"..." Kadar Brock Matt Jones Sam Moyer Scott Reeder December 16th, 2011 - February 4th, 2012 Opening Friday, December 16th, 6-9PM “…” is a group exhibition exploring new tendencies in abstraction. The artists featured all explore a material-driven or process-based approach to abstract painting—beautifully brushless—with a strong dose of humour or the absurd. There are also lots of dots. Hey: it’s an abstract painting show! Scott Reeder makes visually scintillating spray paintings on canvas using the shadows left behind from spaghetti, lentils, and other foodstuffs. These products are often Italian—the nationality of the Arte Povera movement he is reprising. Pasta, Italy, capito? If the Arte Povera movement challenged established art conventions through its use of found or "low" materials, and if abstract expressionism was in many ways a tradition of American hegemony during the Cold War and the ultimate in “high art seriousness” as practitioners confronted the sublime and the subconscious in their energetic output, Scott’s paintings are a strange hybrid of both. Reeder calls himself an “agnostic” when it comes to painting and these works exhibit a profound ambivalence, with nonetheless a visual seductiveness that aims to engage. Sam Moyer makes tonal paintings with bleach and dye, treating the canvas as just another swath of cloth, but also turning the canvas into an illusion of fabric with her weaving, patterned strokes and her illusionistic implications of a fluffy duvet cover all puckered and folded. Unlike Morris Louis or the other poured and stained Color Field painters, Sam makes her viewers unable to consider the work as a window into something or a transportation to another place by insisting on the visual reality that they are staring at a piece of cloth mounted onto some wood. The attention to line and tone evoke the considerations one might encounter pondering an Agnes Martin, while her process insists upon the domesticity or even craftiness of her work. Kadar Brock took the neon paintings from his “failed” series of canvasses from 2005-2008 and in a seeming fit of despair, covered them with various whites, blues and greyed-out paints negating his former exuberance. Folded and pulled, they are then subjected to more angsty torture of sanding, shredding with a razor, more paint and more sanding until Kadar ends up with a result that is a smooth as a baby’s butt; an evocative, ethereal surface. The patterns are dictated largely by a series of 12-sided die rolls and an arbitrary compositional formula attached to the die. How could so much despair and futility, not to mention arbitrariness turn into something so sublime? That is our puzzle. Matt Jones was once told that he needed to hone and focus his use of space. Grumpily he threw white paint onto wet black paint and painted outer space. Whether his peers accepted this as a concerted exploration of space in a painting is unknown; but what he ended up with, perhaps accidentally, is a richly textured, beautifully depth-filled galactic series of abstract paintings. Hiding reds, purples, greens and blues in the rich black, Matt throws white paint onto the surface pulling colors out of the deep void to create small halos of color around each droplet. In case you did not realize that Matt is an abstract artist exploring space, he has hung a planetarium painting above our heads for good measure. While the space paintings are paintings of "everything that exists simultaneously", his internal energy paintings on the adjacent wall are paintings of the intangibility of experience. They are "the you that you can’t see." Lest we find this press release too self-consciously “clever", let me reaffirm that all these artists are crucially interested in being a part of the traditions of abstract painting, while turning the perhaps misapplied seriousness of its legacy on its head. They all seek a way of making a sincere and poignant abstract expression of feelings and ideas, but use various methods of distancing themselves from the myth of the lone artist pushing paint around with their heroic brush; in fact none of these artists use a brush per se. To be a young artist who engages with the daunting abyss of the abstract tradition, these artists critique and burlesque the enormity of the philosophical trajectories of abstraction, while not quite wanting to let them die. The humor is there to humanize abstraction and to acknowledge the widely perceived futility of it, while the artists themselves do not see abstract approaches as futile. Perhaps the more apt quote (elided of course) would be from Herman Hesse “It is an … idea that the more pointedly and logically we formulate a thesis, the more irresistibly it cries out for its antithesis.”

Lisa Adams: paradise Notwithstanding

Lisa Adams: Paradise Notwithstanding | The place that Adams conjures through the juxtaposition of decay and possibility is one that comes to terms with the coexistence of the real and the ideal. "It's a vision of imperfection's guiding light," says the artist.

Just as decay and possibility come together in Lisa Adams' work for Paradise Notwithstanding, the new paintings are completely fluent in both the language of abstraction and of representation. This balance, and tension, leads viewers to explore the varied possibilities within each work, with visual iconography including water features, flora elements, atmospheric texture, and color fields.

In writing about her new work Adams says: "Though the paintings could be viewed as a puzzle, I'd rather think of them as a collection of elements that foster our ability to trust a sense of place in the world while they encourage us to question reality. I'm not interested in beauty or non-beauty, hence the title Paradise Notwithstanding. I'm interested in the complexity that won't allow me to define what I'm looking at, and to establish a narrative; a narrative that's shy and hidden from view and with time unpacks itself."

Lisa Adams: Paradise Notwithstanding opens Sunday, December 11 at CB1 Gallery.

Dave Thomas- Time Line Paintings

For Immediate Release:

Dave Thomas: Time Line Paintings

Exhibition Runs from November 29- December 22

Artist Reception December 2, 2011 6-9pm

House Gallery is pleased to present Time Line Paintings, an exhibition of new work by Idaho-based artist Dave Thomas. The exhibition features a series of mixed-media abstractions that straddle the line between control and spontaneous expression. It opens on November 29 and continues through December 22. An artist’s reception will run from 6-9 PM on December 2, 2011.

Thomas paints with layers of spray paint, latex house paint and even black tar, letting his materials build up, spill over and congeal into seemingly compete shapes. The amorphous bodies that appear in his paintings are divided into sections, each filled with their own, singular patterns. Sometimes, a cocoon-like, red-bordered body will be divided into nine rectangles that together feel like a free-form lesson in modern art history: a Motherwell inspires square, above one reminiscent of Barnett Newman and below one reminiscent of Robert Ryman, and another that recalls Yayoi Kusama. Or a tapered rectangle might be divided into eight parts and pulled together by Pollock-worthy splatter or drips that seep down from one part to another.

Though Thomas, recently featured in a two-person exhibition at the College of Idaho’s Rosenthal Gallery, is interested in the passing of time, his free-spirited approach to history and his riffs on previous eras, artists and movements make time feel flexible and opened ended.

Thomas received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts, in 1973 and 1974. In addition to the Rosenthal Gallery show, he has most recently exhibited at OK Hotel Gallery in Seattle, Galerie Belle Ame in Eagle Idaho, and West L.A. City College. Time Line Paintings is the artist’s first exhibition at House Gallery.

Vincent Como in Ritual Aesthetics at Tompkins Projects

Ritual Aesthetics

Michael Bühler-Rose

Vincent Como

Chris Gentile

Tamara Gonzales

Irvin Morazan

Curated by Progress Report

December 9 - January 14

Opening Reception: Friday, December 9, 6-10pm

* Irvin Morazan performance with the Go! Push Pops in Apocadoodlelypse - 8pm

Ritual Aesthetics brings together five different perspectives on how that act of ritual is absorbed by the creative process and translated into a contemporary art practice. How do certain works of art resonate over time while others fade away, and what special powers do art objects contain or the recording of actions hold? These artists touch on a diverse range of subjects through formal and conceptual devices, that are engaged by art historical movements and cross-cultural traditions, redefining the meaning of the work.

TOMPKINS PROJECTS

127 Tompkins Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11206

Hours: Fri-Sat, 1-6pm & by appointment

www.tompkinsprojects.com

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Progress Report

www.progress-report.org

Amy Lincoln in Round Up at StoreFront- December 18th

STOREFRONT WILL CLOSE IT'S DOORS

DECEMBER 18

After two fantastic years, Storefront will close it's garage door with a final show featuring artists who had one-person exhibitions in the space:

Deborah Brown, Hermine Ford,
Suzanne Goldenberg, Cooper Holoweski,
Andrew Hurst, Norman Jabaut,
Mary Judge, Greg Kwiatek, Justen Ladda,
Amy Lincoln, Kevin Regan, and Austin Thomas

OPENING / CLOSING PARTY:
Friday, December 9

Lisa Adams in art ltd.

Paradise Notwithstanding 2011, oil on panel, 48 x 60 inches

Critic's Picks: Los Angeles

by shana nys dambrot

Nov 2011

Although shadowed by the onset of Pacific Standard Time this fall, contemporary artists in Los Angeles have

not sat meekly on the sidelines to observe the historical parade. Contributing Editor Shana Nys Dambrot picks

out six SoCal artists whose shows are worth detours this fall.

Lisa Adams is kind of the painter's-painter laureate of Los Angeles, though not in a bad way. Adams' work has undergone its share of stylistic nips and tucks, dissolutions and breakthroughs over the years, but through it all, she's never stopped attacking the paper or canvas, and has grown increasingly courageous in her persistent explorations of personal, private narrative and lyrical symbolism. From earlier, superlatively finished, often text-inclusive pictures, to a more recent, decisive loosening of technique and composition, Adams has been a moving target along the abstraction/figuration continuum. She favors tones over tints; even her bright colors are sweetly overcast. She's got a crush on trees and birds, which provide a rich source of narrative analogy for an artist with a love of fairy tales, psychoanalysis, and poems about freedom and gravity. Her scenic protagonists are allegorical armatures, while her gift for draftsmanship and her dreamy way with pigment washes and delicate surfaces are their own, naturalistic reward. Her just-released artist's book "Vicissitudes of Circumstance" (Zero+ Publishing) lavishes attention on passages of detail from her paintings, revealing the edgy expressivity and painterly gymnastics at the foundation of even her most serene pictures.

Her recent show "Lisa Adams: Born This Way" ran from September 11 -- October 9 at Offramp Gallery in Pasadena. "Paradise Notwithstanding" opens at CB1 Gallery downtown December 11, and continues through January 15, 2012.

Joelle Jensen- Nesting

For Immediate Release:

Joelle Jensen: Nesting

Exhibition runs from November 1- November 26, 2011

Artist Reception- Friday November 18, 6-9pm

House Gallery

29 East 400 South

Salt Lake City, UT 84111

www.housegalleryslc.com

801-322-1027

House Gallery is pleased to present Nesting, an exhibition of new photography by Brooklyn-based artist Joelle Jensen. The exhibition features a series of large-format photographs that hover on the edge of abstraction as they explore the transition into parenthood, featuring nest-like forms that intermittently look like they are coming together and coming apart. The exhibition opens on November 1st and continues through November 26. An artist’s reception will run from 6-9 PM on November 18, 2011.

Jensen’s recent work was spurred by a word she heard often when pregnant: Nesting. It describes a parents’ urge to “build a nest” in preparation for the birth of a child, to pull from available resources and create a haven. It also brings together two contradictory urges—one to break away and build your own family unit with a distinct identity, and one to strengthen ties with a bigger networks, to reaffirm your place in a clan of sorts. Jensen symbolically addresses both, cutting apart existing family photos then reassembling them into strange orbs, with strips of imagery clinging to each other. The resulting forms would seem wholly organic, like small, strange bodies, if not for the fragmented glimpses of limbs, eyes and mouths they gave.

After assembling her “nests,” Jensen photographs them using a large format, 4x5 camera. Concentric and smartly composed, with deep black backgrounds, the images have a sleek confidence worthy of Chuck Close or Doug Aitken. They impose calm over the complicated, harry process of bringing new life into the world.

Jensen received her B.F.A. from Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri, in 1996 and an M.F.A. in Visual Arts and M.A. in Theory and Criticism from State University of New York in 2006. She has most recently exhibited at WallSpace Gallery in Seattle and Felicity R. (Bebe) Benoliel Gallery in Philadelphia. Nesting is the artist’s first exhibition at House Gallery.

Jeremy Willis- Attempt

For Immediate Release:

Jeremy Willis: Attempt

Exhibition runs from October 4-October 29, 2011

Artist Reception - Friday October 21, 6-9pm

House Gallery

29 East 400 South

Salt Lake City, UT 84111

www.housegalleryslc.com

801-322-1027

House Gallery is pleased to present Attempt, an exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Jeremy Willis. The exhibition features a series of large-scale, oil-on-canvas images with fleshy, frenetic abstract gestures interspersed with fragments of legible human figures. These never become whole. And that’s the point: Willis wants to know how one person can make herself legible to others in this strange, oversaturated world in which “personal identity” has become a marketable product. The artist’s reception will run from 6-9 PM on October 21, 2011.

Willis’ work puts the personal and public on a collision course, and what you see in the finished paintings is the mayhem the collision has caused. Colors, shapes and patterns are jammed together, caught in a hurricane of confusion. Every form and detail seems to be fighting to become dimensional and human but failing again and again. Willis has referred to his paintings as hybrid, human Rorschach blots, readable if you fall back on your subconscious, but always hovering between pure expressiveness and representation. The show title, Attempt, refers to each piece’s dramatic attempt to make the illegible legible.

There’s a cruelty evident in Willis’ paintings that is intentional and uncomfortably compelling. Because human beings have an innate desire to communicate, depriving them of decipherable identities, and thus the means of communication, is brutal. But abstraction has always toyed with such brutality. Look at Willem de Kooning’s work and you’ll see that it never fully submits to expressionistic gestures. Always, it hovers on the edge of figuration. The same can be said of neo-expressionists like Anselm Kiefer, and it’s these figures, not newer apocalyptic painters like Tomory Dodge and Dana Schutz, with whom Willis seems most resonant, though with one exception. When figures do appear, they’re cartoonish, over-dramatized pop culture ideas of human bodies. This suggests his push to make human beings legible as individuals will never pan out, no matter how many insistent, tumultuous attempts he makes.

Willis received his B.F.A. from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1999 and his M.F.A. from Hunter College in 2008. He has had solo exhibitions at DuMois Gallery in New Orleans and AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island. His work has also appeared in exhibitions at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art and Spattered Columns in New York, the Brooklyn Lyceum, among other venues across the U.S. and Canada. Attempt, the artist’s first solo exhibition at House Gallery, continues through October 29, 2011.

James Huckenpahler: Feature Length Painting

For Immediate Release: James Huckenpahler: Feature Length Painting

Exhibition Runs from September 6- October 1, 2011

Artist Reception- Friday September 16, 6-9pm

House Gallery

29 East 400 South

Salt Lake City, UT 84111

www.housegalleryslc.com

801-322-1027

House Gallery is pleased to present Feature Length Painting, an exhibition of photographic prints by Washington D.C.-based artist James Huckenpahler. The exhibition features a series of images with the retro, grainy appeal of vintage footage and ominousness worthy of David Lynch. The images, derived from a feature-length film the artist recently completed, tell a strange, abstracted story about progress, faith, irreverence and nature. The artist’s reception will run from 6-9 PM on September 6, 2011.

For the past decade, Huckenpahler’s work has veered toward interpretive social history, and he has worked tirelessly on an in-depth illustrated history of Washington D.C. However, in Feature Length Painting, he takes social history in a new direction. Fascinated by the raw, DIY approach reengage filmmaker Jack Smith took to both living and art-making, Huckenpahler decided to pay homage to the filmmaker, who once collaborated with Andy Warhol on a project called Batman/Dracula.

Huckenpahler saw Smith himself as a sort of batman figure—an obscure, mysterious force--and resolved to mimic Smith’s style and penchant for the weirdly cataclysmic. He proposed a feature-length movie that would probe the history of Washington D.C. by focusing on the story of the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA), as an insider of the organization told it to him. The WPA funded the project, and the resulting film pairs footage from the Prelinger Archive, a collection of corporate and institutional film, with footage Huckenpahler shot of costumed collaborators. It traces the art’s organization’s highs and lows, taking the tragic figure of D.C. outsider artist Carroll Sockwell as its batman-style protagonist.

The images in Feature Length Painting, though derived from Huckenpahler’s movie, stand alone, eerily and beautifully. They have the feeling of retro collage—it’s as if Kurt Schwitters had gotten a hold of MADD magazine—combined with the hazy, suspenseful visual language of the horror film. Strange textures and colors overlap images of refinement and sanity, and each piece relies on some kind of visual collision. The bottom half of an orange face might pop out of stoic gray clouds; or batman might appear from inside the silhouette of a contemplative young man. The aura of mystery the images give off present history as something that only becomes stranger and more opaque the deeper we dig into it.

Huckenpahler received his B.F.A. in 1990 from Corcoran College of Art and Design, where he currently teaches. Among other venues, he has exhibited at Marilyn Kiang Gallery in Atlanta, and The Washington Project for the Arts, Fusebox, and Hemphill Gallery in Washington, D.C. Feature Length Painting, the artist’s first solo exhibition at House Gallery, continues through October 1, 2011.

Kadar Brock: wcfsb

For Immediate Release:

Kadar Brock: wcfsb

Exhibition runs from June 2- July 12

Gallery is open until 9pm on June 17th for Gallery stroll

House Gallery

29 East 400 South

Salt Lake City, UT 84111

www.housegalleryslc.com

House Gallery is pleased to present wcfsb, an exhibition of new work by Brooklyn-based artist Kadar Brock. The artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in Salt Lake City, wcfsb opens on June 7th and continues through July 2nd.

The process-based works in wcfsb venture into the world of spell books and fantasy games. The title, an acronym for “Wizard Class Feature -Spell Book,” foreshadows the mysterious but cerebral lyricism that characterizes much of the work in the show. All informed by a grimoire that he has kept in recent months, Brock’s mixed media drawings describe spells chosen by his magic using avatar in the fantasy role playing game Dungeons & Dragons. In the game a wizard memorizes spells during meditation and forgets spells upon casting. Making this literal in the drawings, text is loosely scrawled across each page, and then obscured by black streaks of spray paint and scribbles of ink. As a result, the works are dark attempts at obfuscation rather than recipes for magic. They embody a reciprocal belief in, and doubting of, the metaphysical magic of art making.

In Dungeons and Dragons, the ultimate goal of keeping a spell book is to prepare for campaigning—or going off in search of adventure. Adventurers become their chosen player characters, or avatars, and participate in communal story telling, make real an other reality. Brock sees this dynamic as analogous to looking at and making abstract art - both are processes of participation, and both require a suspension of disbelief for full enjoyment. Beyond this analogy and its implications, the artist is fully invested in creating a contemplative space and the experience of simpatico. The work is self-reflexive and self-destructive in an attempt to represent a loss of self.

An exhibition that’s more interested in the grittiness and detritus of decision- and plan-making than wizardry itself, wcfsb suggests the impetus to strategize and systemize may be more telling, and full of more twists and turns, than the impetus to act.

Brock, who holds a Bachelors of Fine Art from The Cooper Union School of Art, has exhibited internationally. His work recently appeared at Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and Thierry Goldberg Projects.

Chuck Feesago: This is Samoan Art

For Immediate Release:

Chuck Feesago: This is Samoan Art

Exhibition runs from May 3- June 4

Artist Reception- Friday May 20, 2011 from 6-9pm

House Gallery

29 East 400 South

Salt Lake City, UT 84111

www.housegalleryslc.com

House Gallery will be closed from May 10- May 17

House Gallery is pleased to present This is Samoan Art, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Chuck Feesago. A meditation on convergences and separations, the exhibition opens on May 3rd and continues through June 4th. An artist’s reception will be held on May 20th from 6-9 PM.

Chuck Feesago’s mixed media works, rhythmic, repetitive and yet strangely renegade in their approach to material, each offer a ritualistic sense of wholeness. But wholeness is deceptive, Feesago suggests. Motivated by the ways in which the cultural tropes of the Pacific Islands merge and overlap with tropes specific to the U.S., the artist has used relatively simple but still culturally loaded patterns and shapes to explore sameness and differences, inclusions and omissions.

Either made of squares woven out of string, acrylic and paper or from round coffee filters on paper mounted on wood, the works in This is Samoan Art are neither authentically Samoan nor purporting to be. Instead, they consider whether hybridity and authenticity can coexist peaceably. Despite the fact that they ask fairly contemporary questions, they have a certain timelessness to them, the kind often associated with traditional craft and tribal design. Circles and squares in the past, art associated with the Pacific has tended to be about the Pacific and not of it. The Pacific of the 19th century saw painters like Nicholas Chevalier and, most famously, Paul Gaugin set up camp on what they considered exotic shores, like those of Tahiti and Samoa, and bring these shores to the attention of the art-viewing West. Even within recent decades, non-natives like New Zealand painter Nigel Brown have become better known for their representations of the Pacific than any islanders themselves.

Feesago, well aware of the army of outsiders associated with Pacific art, does not endeavor to represent Samoa or its neighbors at all. He’s far more interested in the process of making objects in one place that have been influenced by another, and the way weaving materials in and out of each other resembles the way cultures and traditions migrate, spread and become enmeshed.

More in line with artists like Kiki Smith or Mark Bradford, makers who understand the metaphorical potential of process, than with those who dabble in cultural anthology, the sensibility Feesago brings to This is Samoan Art has to do with work ethic and intuition. It’s about gut trusting, fusion and reverence for cultures far and near. This reverence manifests most compellingly in Feesago’s refusal to make art that is anything other than art—material brought together via the hand of an artist fascinated by the way rituals from far-away but vital regions can spread and leak into the culture that surrounds him in the here and now.

Feesago holds an M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate University and a B.A. from University of California-Irvine. He has exhibited at Offramp Gallery in Pasadena, University of La Verne’s West Gallery, and the L.A. Municipal Art Gallery, among other venues.

- Catherine Wagley

Amy Lincoln- Through the Window

For Immediate Release:

Amy Lincoln: Through the Window

House Gallery

29 East 400 South

Salt Lake City, UT 84111

801-910-1731

www.housegalleryslc.com

Dates: April 5- April 30

Artist Reception: Friday April 15, 6-9pm

House Gallery is pleased to present Through the Window, an exhibition of new work by Brooklyn-based artist Amy Lincoln. This is Lincoln’s first solo show with the gallery, and the first time her work will appear in Salt Lake City. Through the Window opens April 5th and continues through April 30th. An artist’s reception will be held on April 15th, from 6-9 PM.

Contemplative to an extreme, each of Lincoln’s paintings depicts a view of the inside of the artist’s apartment, equating tangible interior space with the less tangible interior of the subconscious. Intimately sized and carefully composed, the paintings have an illustrative quality that resonates with the more sophisticated of graphic novels—Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi come to mind—but they also have an intentional seriousness, channeling the inspired still lifes of the Northern Renaissance. Lincoln’s Brooklyn Still Life in particular, with its preternaturally spaced items and low-hung mirror, looks like something Jan Van Eyck might have arranged. Yet Van Eyck would have used far less blue and green than Lincoln, who relies on her cool palette to give the work its aloofly introspective aura.

Despite a hand that reaches in to pull back a curtain in Through the Window, a cool image with a large garden window at its center, the only human likenesses in Lincoln’s paintings are in mirrors, picture frames, or drawings left on tables. Lincoln has called these portholes into the subconscious, and the image of an un-smiling but attentive brownhaired girl that appears on or in them her avatar in the two-dimensional world.

Interiority and exteriority diverge and converge in Lincoln’s work, and looking out and looking in are occasionally interchangeable—in Loft Garden, for instance, we’re gazing at a gorgeously arranged assortment of hanging and standing potted plants while Lincoln’s 2-D avatar stares back at us from inside a blue-rimmed frame. We’re gazing in at her as she gazes out.

Through the Window engages states of mind; it’s about the thoughtfulness and self-awareness that creativity requires, but it’s also about the timeworn history of art as a space of contemplation, a space in which time slows to a near stop and the laws of nature are suspended. In space like that, imagination and reality can become difficult to tell apart.

Lincoln holds a B.A. from UC Davis, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from Brandeis University, and an M.F.A. from Temple University. She has exhibited at NurtureArt, Storefront Gallery, Camel Art Space Michael Steinberg Fine Art, and Thierry Goldberg Projects, and recently participated in group exhibitions at West L.A. College and the Nexus Foundation in Philadelphia.

Tyrone Davies- Purgatory of Sweat, Crucible of Bullets

House Gallery is pleased to present San Francisco based conceptual artist and filmmaker, Tyrone Davies. Daviesʼ innovative work manifests through myriad medium; video, installation, sculpture, performance, printmaking and painting, to name a few. he is perhaps most well known for his film and video installation through which he scrutinizes one of the most ubiquitous forms of media, television.

Daviesʼ work is a critical exploration of mass culture and spectacle, as well a direct material appraisal of consumption and obsoleted technologies. Through his thoughtful investigations, Davies draws the viewersʼ attention to the underlining values of a collective culture and obsession with innovation.

Daviesʼ recent work, “purgatory of Sweat, Crucible of Bullets” will be showing at the House Gallery from March 28th through April 2th, with an artistʼs reception on april 1st from 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. House Gallery is committed to cutting edge contemporary art in Utah, and is located at 29 e. 400 s. Salt Lake City, Utah.

-Melissa Smolley

Charles Fresquez- Studies for the Next Generation

Charles Fresquez: Studies for the Next Generation

House Gallery is pleased to present Studies for the Next Generation, an exhibition of new work by New Mexico-based artist Charles Fresquez. In his low-key, clear-headed abstractions, Fresquez marries simple designs, some of which recall the zig-zagged geometry of Zapotec weaving, with a minimal luminosity that riffs on the West Coast’s Light and Space enterprise. As a result, his cast acrylic surfaces have both an earthiness and a calculated luminosity. Studies for the Next Generation opens on March 1 and continues through March 26, 2011.

The artist’s reception, which will coincide with Salt Lake City’s Gallery Stroll, runs from 6-9 PM on March 18, 2011.

Fresquez, who grapples with fairly unwieldy visual legacies—both the history of abstraction and the role of Hispanic American art in the current art world lexicon—, thinks of his pieces as living entities. They respond to their pasts and grow into their futures. Influenced equally by the open, intensely lit space of New Mexico and the science of genetics, his work is loosely modeled after biological regeneration. This current body of work regenerates a past one, moving from a more horizontal, linear approach to abstraction to a gridded one, characterized by diagonals and perpendicular patterns.

All of the works in Studies for the Next Generation are untitled, perfect twelve by twelve inch squares, accessibly small but still assertive. Made of cast acrylic, enamel and silicone, the surfaces are composites of quarter inch thick acrylic parallelograms that have been painted on their backs and sides, giving the illusion of three dimensions and causing colors to cast shadows on each other. These seemingly sculptural geometric shapes have a smartly colored palette that includes reds, blues, oranges and a gratifying array of whites that reflect back on one another and begin to evoke yellows and pinks.

The effect recalls the sublimely “cool” approach of minimalist innovators Larry Bell and Craig Kaufmann. But it also resonates with the unapologetic indulgence in design of artists like Jim Isermann and the judicious weaving of Native American artisans whose angles and shapes feel like narratives even when they tell no explicit story. The patterns in Fresquez’s next generation seem perfectly poised to continue regenerating, or storytelling, forever, which is, ultimately, the point: to create a method of working that continually recreates itself and pushes forward through time.

Fresquez, who holds a Bachelors of Fine Art from the University of New Mexico, has exhibited at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, The Livingroom Contemporary Art Salon in Salt Lake City, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and the Richard Levy Gallery, among other venues.

-Catherine Wagley

Chris Dunker- February at House Gallery

House Gallery is pleased to present Truss, an exhibition of new photography by Utah-based artist Chris Dunker. The architectural images in Truss explore industrial culture with magnificent coolness, presenting the utilitarian as uncompromisingly beautiful. The exhibition opens on February 1st, 2011. The opening reception begins at 5:30 on February 18th and features a performance of FE26, a coolheaded, unhurried arrangement written by experimental composer Benjamin Taylor in response to Dunker’s photographs.

In making the work for Truss, Dunker sought out hangars, stadiums, warehouse, and other structures in which form dictates function, specifically focusing on trusses as the graphic elements that both define space and embody efficiency. It’s the truss that enables these powerful structures to stand, yet a certain delicacy accompanies their strength.

Delicacy and strength coexist in each of Dunker’s photographs. In Golden Truss, a web of supports weaves into the background, while natural lighting causes each of the building’s yellow-orange and copper-colored elements to quietly glow. Perspective matters immensely in this image and others, as Dunker’s series pays homage to the vastness of industrial space and the importance of redundancy, a trope that enforces both the utility and sublimity of the structures Dunker features. In Hongduk Steelcord, fluorescent lights pull the eye back into a space defined by Renaissance-worthy one-point perspective.

The classically modern approach Dunker takes to his work makes the form and function of his photographs, just like that of his subjects, symbiotic. Images with austerely elegant compositions are as functionally compelling as the structures they portray.

Dunker, the son of an industrial filmmaker, has been exploring industrial imagery and architecture for over two decades. He holds a B.S. in Applied Art and Design from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. In 1995, he received an M.F.A. in photography from Utah State University, where he worked as an Assistant Professor of Photography. He has exhibited nationally and his work belongs to a number of respected collections, including those of the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art and Brigham Young University.

- Catherine Wagley