Press Release
- Exhibition: RECONFIGURED
- Showing: January 15th 2016 - February 20th 2016
- Opening Reception: FRIDAY JANUARY 15TH, 2016 6PM-9PM
William Stoehr
Starting with a vague or elusive expression and an uncertain context, I hope to provoke viewers into visually completing my portraits with their own more complete and ideal mental image and to then create the narrative based on their own experience and feelings.
We are attracted to faces – it is our nature. If I fill the canvas with a big face then there is little room for external leading context. I think that the large size and closely cropped image creates an elevated sense of intimacy. Searching for meaning, viewers may turn inward to create a subjective reality.
If I engage you with eyes then I can also start to do other things peripherally with line and color. I can color outside of the lines and your mind will resolve it. Vague and scribbled outlines and graphic vectors become part of a recognizable whole while a hint of “unreal” complimentary and equal value color causes the eyes to seem life-like. I experiment with the amount and type of information required to evoke an image and to find those characteristics that cause the viewer to emotionally respond to the portrait.
All of my paintings start with a live model and then I work from reference photographs. I have developed a practice of deliberately reacting to less than controlled and/or accidental incidences.
I use a limited pallet of acrylic paint. I vary the coverage, spraying varnish between layers and then scrubbing, scraping, scratching or sanding the surface while applying a variety of marks – strokes, dots and other adjustments. I try not to differentiate between my drawing and painting.
These paintings tend to be layers of fresh starts. I believe I might have a finished face one day but soon I brush, flow or spill paint all over the surface, leaving traces – a template to guide the next iteration.
It seems that whenever I think I have a new idea I find someone who did it, sometimes, centuries ago. I am not interested in imitation. I am interested in continuing their inquiries. I consider myself to be a traditional artist in search of ways to build on the past. In the end I am attempting to facilitate alternative emotional experiences through the use of changing and alternate points of view, engaging gaze, uncertain context, elusive emotion and naturalistic cues.
Mark Sink
For me ‚ Art is an attempt at the sublime. Great images talk to you and keep talking through the years, never growing old. I am a gushy romantic and I still believe in beauty. I like work that explores. I am from the old world of photographic craft in silver printing, platinum and other alternative processes so those are near and dear to me. The nude – magical, erotic, aesthetic – has been modeled and painted since prehistory.
Today the nude is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The nude in general, in America, is in a very victorian suppressed state. Debates seem to be increasing around artists and photographers and their nude subjects. Objectification and the male gaze is at the center of the feminist march. Conservative society in the other corner. I am not going to open that door here but I ask.. can one be an object and subject at the same time? I say yes . Can one be simultaneously exposed and empowered? I say yes. Also I believe a great concept can win everyone over.
More simplistic, I like collaborations with the model. You can feel the open collaboration in the picture even with sexually charged images. It feels honest and real. Its hard to put in words but when a model is sharing in creation of the image that is when magic happens. Super images come from a super collaborative muse. Great artist muse/ models through history come to mind, Evelyn Nesbit and Rudolf Eickemeyer, Kiki and ManRay, Clara Bow, Betty Paige, and of course Marilyn Monroe.They made history. Celebrated artist models are rare today.
Mike Rand
My ceramic art links to the old. It takes art traditions and mutates them into personal visions. Two keys to understand the thinking behind the way my art moves from traditional to the new come from Leonardo Da Vinci, who wrote that: “man should become universal”, and that one needs to learn as much as possible about as many things as possible too truly understand the world – the Gestalt. Using these related approaches I push the boundaries of what ceramics, as a medium, should become. While linked to traditions past, the ideas and process used in my work stretch the materials’ chemical properties and limits to open potentials for new ceramic aesthetics.
One needs to venture beyond the safety of boundaries to see what is really possible with a medium. This is an uncertain endeavor. It calls up the idea that the opposite ends of the spectrum of fantasy-reality can exist at a single time within the piece of ceramic art. Using a thought and production process that brings my beliefs in scientific studies into the reference frame of ceramic arts provides clearer focus. Out of the uncertainties of the wood kiln’s fiery space of chaotic forces I see my work in the “fantasy” of the viewer’s internal world and the “reality” of the surrounding external universe.
Jason Lee Gimbel
Known for his life size figurative paintings, Jason Lee Gimbel’s work explores his ideas and discoveries through the use of the human form, directly and at times indirectly. Often incorporating visual metaphors that explore the production, absorption and experimental challenge to reinterpret figurative art.
Living systems in conversation; a definition of metabolism that continues to shape the relationship to Gimbel’s artwork. In this sense the act of repetition, production and mastery of a subject become the expressed deconstruction of aesthetics. Traditional drawing and digitized drawing approaches are recontextualized and apportioned into a uniformly balanced painting. The works exist not as homage nor appropriation, rather the vassal of the visual experience.
