Filed under: Seattle, The Conversation | Tags: Amanda Manitach, Ian Toms, Platform Gallery, Robert Yoder, Season, The Conversation
This is the first in a series of discussions conducted between professionals – gallerists, collectors, curators, artists – who have some kind of connection or partnership that elicits conversation about practice, collaboration, or the business of art. Robert Yoder (NAP #7, #85) is a Seattle-based artist who has shown work internationally and is no stranger to New American Paintings. He runs a gallery called SEASON out of his mid-century home in the Ravenna neighborhood of Seattle. Ian Toms is a young painter and sculptor who has developed a close working relationship with Yoder. Both of their work flirts with provocative obfuscation and dabbles in a vernacular of glamorous filth. Perhaps flirts and dabbles are too weak of terms.
The following interview took place in Toms’ studio. It’s sparse, gritty. There are a lot of spray paint cans and sharpies scattered around, canvases stacked up, ripped magazine images and sketches taped to the walls. One of the sharpie drawings on the wall shows an S-shape repeated randomly on the page. - Amanda Manitach, Seattle Contributor
Ian Toms and Robert Yoder
Filed under: Interview, Seattle | Tags: Amanda Manitach, Buddy Bunting, Pole Drift, Seattle
The centerpiece of Buddy Bunting’s Flat Time Blue at Prole Drift (on view through May 27th) is a panoramic watercolor and flashe painting that stretches twelve feet across the wall. The painting depicts a prison washed out and warmed up with scalding bright yellow sun, its structural starkness rendered sheer and almost weightless. It’s the tenth in a series Bunting has been developing since 2004. In this piece, as well as in the smaller sketches hung in Prole Drift’s back room, Bunting transforms the sterile architecture of correctional facilities and American industrial sprawl into visionary landscapes where the political and social narratives nested within the physicality of buildings meld with a sense of the imaginary. - Amanda Manitach, Seattle Contributor
Buddy Bunting | Idaho Correctional Center, Kuna, Idaho, 2011-12, watercolor, flashe and pencil on paper, 52 x 145 in.
Image courtesy of Prole Drift.
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Filed under: Interview, Seattle | Tags: Amanda Manitach, Jen Erickson, Punch Gallery
The tenuously-connected tissue of small marks on Jen Erickson’s paintings at PUNCH Gallery (On view through June 3) fan out like smoke curls, clustered blooms of algae or exploding supernova. Some diptych panels, hung side-by-side, have mirrored designs, like bifurcated stains on a Rorschach blot or diagrams depicting binary division and replication of cells. The unfurling sprawl is comprised of thousands of graphite zeroes drawn over oil paint on panels. In this blend of the organic and mathematical, Erickson’s work melancholically dwells on the inability to retain memory. But if the paintings are wastelands filled with empty marks, wandering over them triggers its own host of daydreams, associations and involuntary memory. - Amanda Manitach, Seattle Contributor
Jen Erickson | Diversion 1, 2011, graphite and oil on panel, 36 x 48 inches.
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Filed under: Review, Seattle | Tags: Denzil Hurley, Erin Langner, Francine Sedars Gallery, Robert Storr
One would not expect to happen upon Robert Storr’s paintings inside a small gallery in a residential neighborhood of Seattle. Finding Storr’s paintings on the Internet is difficult enough, given the visual art behemoth’s repertoire of curatorial projects and writings. For the month of April, however, four modest works titled S.P. #1, 2, 3, 4 reside in a corner of Francine Sedars’s house-turned-gallery, alongside a series of monochromatic black paintings by Seattle artist Denzil Hurley. - Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor
Installation view. Image courtesy of Francine Sedars Gallery.
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Filed under: Review, Seattle | Tags: Claire Cowie, Eric Elliott, Erin Langner, James Harris Gallery, Marcelino Gonçalves, Mary Ann Peters, Mirage, Seattle, Will Henry
The concept of the mirage is one of intrigue, as evidenced by pop culture’s frequent attempts to define its mystery. A floating desert oasis memorably deceives Daffy Duck into inhaling a mouthful of sand (“Aqua Duck,” 1963), while Steve Wynn’s Mirage casino enchants Las Vegas visitors with its lush terrarium and waterfall-lined swimming pools. Within the context of such widely known references, the question of how the mirage can function within a painting is an interesting one posed by James Harris Gallery’s group show focused on this theme. –Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor
Will Henry | In the Dust, 2011. gouache on paper, 11” x 10”
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Filed under: Interview, Seattle | Tags: Ben Waterman, Erin Langner, Greg Kucera, Seattle
Ben Waterman’s paintings invite extended meditation on seemingly banal objects: a red mosquito net, a brown piano, a vacant fireplace. These highly specific objects float in contrast to their surroundings–disorientingly unidentifiable places painted with inarticulate brushstrokes. Given the Seattle artist’s pronounced affinity for travel to new places, these surreal landscapes prompt questions on the complicated role of inspiration within constructed visual images. I caught up with Ben to discuss Midnight Lullaby, his new show at Greg Kucera Gallery, and the real places buried within the layers of his work. - Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor
Ben Waterman | Piano in a Room with a Greek Amphora, 2011, Oil paint and graphite on canvas, 24 x 40 inches.
Image courtesy of Greg Kucera Gallery.
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Filed under: Review, Seattle | Tags: Akio Takamori, Almeida, Erin Langner, Evan Holloway, James Harris Gallery, Jason Teraoka, Mark Mumford, Sarah Awad, Shimon Minamikawa, Travis Collinson
Give Me Head at Seattle’s James Harris Gallery transpires most literally: as a collection of 21 heads. This group show of paintings and sculptures primarily created within the last five years offers a visual survey of the face. With very limited exceptions, a lack of expression represents the unifying theme of the imagery. Although some eyes meet the viewer dead-on and others gaze outside the confines of their frames, the intimacy affiliated with portraiture is consistently absent among these stoic figures, raising the question: why would the lack of expression define this body of work? - Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor
Give Me Head installation view. Left to Right: Evan Holloway, Sarah Awad, Almeida, Mark Mumford, Shimon Minamikawa, Akio Takamori. Image courtesy of James Harris Gallery.
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Filed under: Review, Seattle | Tags: Erin Langner, Greg Kucera, Katy Stone, Myriad, Seattle
Katy Stone’s Myriad visually reverberates throughout the otherwise silent rooms of Seattle’s Greg Kucera gallery. The artist’s vibrant forms of painted aluminum are known for walking lines, fluctuating between two and three dimensions, between the linear and the organic, between painting and sculpture. In her most recent body of work, these explorations expand to include additional mediums, as the oversized collage titled Myriad (You Are Here) extends across the floor, forming a 15 x 5 ft. centerpiece for the show. - Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor
Katy Stone | Myriad installation view. Image courtesy of Greg Kucera Gallery.
Filed under: Art Market, Art World, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, DC, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Must-Sees, New Jersey, New York, Oakland, Philadelphia, Philly, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Seattle | Tags: December, Must-SEe
In the 300+ gallery exhibitions that we previewed for this post, we discovered a number of New American Paintings’ alumni on view in December. Jim Lutes continues to produce a substantial body of work and, once again, demonstrates why he is one of Chicago’s leading painters. And check out Dolphin Gallery’s group exhibition “Push” which features several NAP artists, including a favorite of ours, Michael Krueger. Other shows that stand out: Fernando Mastrangelo at Charest-Weinberg, Byron Kim and James Cohan Gallery, and Cordy Ryman and Eli Ridgway. Enjoy the list! Please check them out and let us know what you think in the comments section after the jump!
Cordy Ryman | Shadow Boxed, acrylic, enamel and graphite on wood, 38 x 33.5 x 3.5 inches
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Filed under: Review, Seattle | Tags: 11.11.11.11, Erin Langner, Nola Avienne, Seattle, soil gallery
The richness of Nola Avienne’s work invites visual indulgence. Captivating the eye through highly textural, densely composed imagery, her sculptures and mixed media works hover within the classic duality of the beautiful and the grotesque without perpetuating clichés. The Seattle artist distinguishes her work through the use of unusual mediums, best known for her meticulously crafted sculptures comprised of iron filings. Some of these manifest as intricate forms reminiscent of lush, fungal-like organisms; others demonstrate the kinetic potential of their magnetic medium through geometric mechanisms that circulate quietly in slow motion. – Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor
