Press Release
- Exhibition: reMarkable
- Showing: April 7th 2016 - May 14th 2016
- Opening Reception: THURSDAY APRIL 7TH, 2016 6PM-9PM
MICHAEL GADLIN | SANGEETA REDDY
SKYLER MCGEE | JUDY CAMPBELL | PHILIP TARLOW
ARTIST TALK WITH PHILIP TARLOW 5:30PM-6PM
Refreshments provided by Relish Catering and Events
MICHAEL GADLIN
I look at art as a much bigger and exciting concept than that which relies on possessing a pleasant visual identity. A picture that merely stands on the limitations of something easy-on-the-eye. For me painting has been a tool to explore what I do not yet know.
The act of making art [process] is setup for those who have a deep desire to be challenged and bring to light important questions.
Identifying intelligent problems that can only be quenched visually, through a cogent body of work. I feel by taking this visual approach seriously, I’m able to articulate and express clearer than my words can ever say. My interest in unexpected (visual) relationships from an abstract point of view, expresses a common universal dialogue that crosses social and racial boundaries. Exhibiting both intuitive responsiveness and an element of contrivance delivers an understanding toward the importance of serious practice and critique in a historical context. This communication through thoughtful interpretation and expression seems critical to me. In addition, accepting that which can challenge everything you know is an important idea in the search for meaning. Merely declaring yourself as an artist isn’t enough. An honest examination of the work is determined by the sum of two things; that which you do not know, and that which you practice. I’m dedicated to a serious and rigorous practice of observation that has the ability to make the art relevant in any arena.
PHILIP TARLOW
Collages in mixed media on paper and canvas, mostly based upon small plein air paintings from a local creek and inspired by 11th c. chinese calligrapher huang tingjian.
“….confusable, unstable images that switch identities, like ludwig wittgenstein’s famous duck-rabbit figure, but confusable, unstable images that refuse to be claimed linguistically for identification, ….something seen only fleetingly or under obscure circumstances.” john elderfield on dekooning
“homeless representation….a plastic and descriptive painterliness that is applied to abstract ends, but which continues to suggest representational ones.” clement greenberg on dekooning, 1962
SKYLER MCGEE
Skyler McGee paints to locate herself. Location is not only an established place; it is also a network of relationships to be traversed and negotiated. To live somewhere, especially to create a sense of home, requires living with and through relationships to the soil, to birds and feral cats, to canned soup and shower curtains, to neighbors, strangers, streets, and sunlight.
Working in and across multiple mediums, her work belongs on the borders. She explores the spaces between disciplines, between materials, and between environments, depicting places where relationships cannot be assumed but must be crafted, developed, and sustained in all their threatening and beautiful complexity.
Rocks, insects, and flora meet unrecognizable forms, abstracted landscapes, and objects from other settings. The interplay between the forms and colors are neither serene nor aggressive. Rather, the work inhabits the experienced space of possibility, the spaces and spacing in between chaos and stillness, the settings before and after, in which we may live towards a home. The artwork maps our personal and communal lives as they unfold in the midst of ecological, cultural, and communal transformations.
Trained in oil painting and mixed-media work, she draws from the Abstract Expressionists and Post-Impressionists, employing domestic imagery as well as gesture and ornament. Across and through the various mediums, she probes the fissures—openings and wounds—that mark our efforts to find or craft some understanding and experience that this life and this world can be, also, a home for us.
SANGEETA REDDY
Life cycles have a way of re-occurring. Only, they never return in perfect circles, but in wobbly, misshapen ellipses, unexpectedly, unpredictably, and yet with a certain rhythm. The shape has always been present in my work from the earliest tentative explorations into abstract shapes.
Monotypes are everything that is direct, spontaneous, unexamined, unbidden, and confident, gushing on their own, in that moment when creating is merely a channel for something beyond the conscious. The collage is everything the monotype is not: thoughtful, considered and meandering; it is what seeps quietly beneath the surface, conscious and aware. But above all, it is the thinnest of skins – fragile, absorbent and tenacious.
For this new body of work that I have come to think of the ellipse series, I worked back into the monotypes. In a careful, deliberative process, I laid down thin skins of tissue, of paper, of cloth, making marks, erasing, red-defining, re-aligning, sometimes with charcoal and paint, sometimes thick, sometimes, thin; transparent and opaque. The more I concealed, the more what was revealed became mysterious and charged. To heighten the contemplative quality of these collages, I superimposed a neutral palette on the vivid inks and active surface of the underlying monotype.
CHARLES WOOLDRIDGE
As we are taught history, in a two-dimensional timeline, do we only see the leaves blown across our path, not knowing from what tree and what roots they come from? If we are taught to recognize the greater sphere around the path, the totality of creation, knowing the different trees and objects in such a way that our thoughts become the greater mass before us, we are indeed lucky. That is the artist’s task- to enable us to embrace thelarger view, to take on a greater sense of gravity than the mere juxtaposition of the rock next to the path, making something, finding the connection, physically building something with the rock, the trees and the fallen leaves. Constructing with elements that are only limited by-products of history itself.
JUDY CAMPBELL
My paintings begin with texture – collaged paper, cloth, canvas and more. I then block out geometric shapes of circles, lines, squares. I randomly choose my paint colors and as I drip, splatter, rub and scratch the layers become more organic. Each painting becomes a journey using texture, color and composition. At the end of that journey, the painting comes to its own conclusion.
