The Painted Desert
The Painted Desert Part I October 5 - November 12, 2017 Eleanna Anagnos Marisa Baumgartner Ryan Crotty Robert Otto Epstein Francisco Esnayra Theresa Hackett Jill Levine Ali Miller Colin Thomson Lindsay Walt
Part II November 16 - December 24, 2017 Fatemeh Burnes Cara Cole Peter Fox Jill Levine Mary Jones Daina Mattis James Miller Bobbie Oliver Hanna Von Goeler Lindsay Walt
Foreward
As an almost completely native Southern Californian, I’ve always been drawn to the desert, both conceptually and aesthetically. It was a place both geographically close to and environmentally light years away from the horse property I grew up on (until of course, the entirety of California is a desert ). The vastness and natural color gradients of the landscape always spoke to the part of me that longed for solitude, the same way that I, and every other artist, creates. The Painted Desert exhibition lends it’s name to both the nexus of New York City--- to where I did my reverse Manifest Destiny along with the many High Noon artists from around the globe that live and work here--- but also to the idea of a thriving eco-system in a changing, and not always nurturing environment. I also like the duality of erosion, how it both reveals and conceals. The actual Painted Desert owes it’s wonder to the erosion of time and how stratified layers slowly reveal a history of change, while more recent histories are buried, to be discovered at an appropriate time. Since coming to New York as a child I have seen many changes, none of which I lived amongst until recently, and became inspired by the nomadic nature of the creative climate and it’s parallels with the shifting socio-economic structure of the city. Opening High Noon Gallery was also reflective of the layers of my own stratified history working in the arts; my roster is composed of eight years of artists I’ve come to know from my humble beginnings as a gallery intern to artists I’ve met during my time as a NYC resident. The Painted Desert exhibition celebrates this merging of worlds for me, and the vast talent I have had the honor of working with over the years. It’s an homage to the creative nucleus of New York, and all the artists who find commonality amongst and contribute to the most precious component of New York’s creative ecosystem. Jared Linge Owner/Director High Noon Gallery
Creativity Surpasses it’s Weight in Gold Straddling the borders of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, the Painted Desert is known for its brilliantly colored eroded soils, creating enormous bands of varying shades of reds, browns, and even lavender. This natural wonder serves as a metaphor for High Noon’s two-part inaugural exhibition, “The Painted Desert,” which highlights New York as a crossroads of creativity. Featuring works by the new gallery’s 18 represented artists, “The Painted Desert” includes drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, collage, and everything in between. Like the Painted Desert itself, many artists straddle borders not only between artistic media and styles, but also the more rigid boundaries of political geography. Native New Yorker Jill Levine has a unique way of crossing painting with sculpture. Inspired by pre-Columbian art, she creates styrofoam sculptures that look vaguely like animals or insects and paints them with colorful geometric shapes, at times using a projector to wrap the design around them. Mounted on the gallery wall, they look like traffic signs out of Alice in Wonderland, with arrows pointing every which way encompassed in an optical illusion, waiting for a passerby to look at them so they can immediately change direction. Born in Germany, Hanna Von Goeler immigrated to the U.S. with her parents while still an infant. Growing up bilingual, her work explores “between-ness.” In her Migration series, Von Goeler painted birds on defunct currency, including European banknotes made obsolete by the Euro—Portuguese escudo, Dutch guilder, Greek drachma. Marisa Baumgartner, who grew up in Washington, DC and Austria, creates works that are photographic and painterly. Using found surveillance and NASA satellite photos, Baumgartner’s adorned inkjet prints of geographical landscapes draw attention to environmental as well as social issues. Manantali 03.24.03, for example, presents a bird’s-eye view of Mali’s Lake Manantali, an artificial body of water created by the Manantali Dam. The dam provides a large part of the nation with electricity, but it has also displaced thousands of people and changed the agricultural landscape of its surroundings, devastating local fisheries, and even breeding waterborne parasites. In Baumgarten’s rendering, the problematic body of water is ironically adorned in silver leaf, a nod to both Klimt and her own Austrian roots. The silver thread of extravagance weaves through several other artists’ works as well. Ali Miller’s Engage offers up a canvas so full of colorful flowers, golden ribbons, and crystal wine glasses that it may even take a second glance to notice the miserable woman in the bottom corner with her face in a plate, disguised even by her own sequined dress. The colors of the Painted Desert also sweep through the works in the exhibition. Theresa Hackett’s colorful layers of paints, resins, marble dust, markers, silver leaf, ink, and even spilled coffee and whisky could be strata of geologic time, while the works of Fatemeh Burnes, Eleanna Anagnos, and Ryan Crotty feature a turquoise (however subtle at times) often equated with the American Southwest.
Burnes’s series of small, square, abstract oil paintings, Crossovers, taps into the subconscious like a Rorschach test, while Crotty’s abstraction references subtle variations in light. Anagnos’s hydrocal wall sculptures have a science-fiction feel to them, like objects created on the moon with mysterious symbolism prevalent throughout. Inspired by Chinese landscapes, Japanese screens, and Islamic tiles, Lindsay Walt’s perfectly named Strata series of watercolors combines turquoise with geometric design. Geometry also plays a large part, and almost pulses, in Colin Thomson’s oil paintings, particularly in the turquoise-and-orange Gate. Robert Otto Epstein’s intricate, bright colored pencil drawings follow patterns that appear woven into the paper, like pixels of neon. Cascading layers of paint appear in Crotty’s Gray Matter as well as Peter Fox’s Untitled (Rigor), which tilts to almost a diamond shape, setting into motion its Abstract Expressionist-inspired paint spill. Meanwhile, Mary Jones takes layering into a different sphere with collages of oils, spray paint, and even x-rays from her late in-laws, in a sense creating portraits of radiation. Cara Cole’s The Sky Above, The Mud Below juxtaposes the natural world with human nature, while Daina Mattis focuses on the absurdity of human creation. Francisco Esnayra takes this absurdity a step further, creating busts with twisted and anguished faces, postmodern versions of Messerschmidt’s character heads with giant pharmaceutical pills jammed into their skulls. And where Esnayra takes us into the psychologically horrifying, James Miller and Bobbie Oliver bring us back to a calm reality with their contemplative abstractions of landscape and light. Whether through color, design, concept, or subtle reference, all the works in “The Painted Desert” draw the viewer into a uniquely alluring landscape. Back in 1540, when Francisco Vázquez de Coronado discovered the Painted Desert, he was actually looking for legendary cities made of gold. One could argue that what he found was much more valuable.
Elena Goukassian 2017
Eleanna Anagnos b. Evanston, IL
BIO: Eleanna Anagnos is a New York-based artist and curator. Her work explores the nature of human perception and aims to elicit a physiological response where subjectivity, phenomenology, and the conscious act of seeing are addressed. Eleanna earned her MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art (2005) and a BA with honors and distinction from Kenyon College with a concentration in Women’s and Gender Studies (2002). She has received awards from Yaddo; BAU Institute; The Anderson Ranch, The Atlantic Center for the Arts and The Joan Mitchell Foundation, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is a Co-Director at Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery and curatorial collective located in Brooklyn, NY. In August, Eleanna’s work was covered in the New York Times for her participation in dOGUMENTA, a NYC public exhibition for dogs. STATEMENT: Eleanna’s mother somatizes Eleanna’s emotions. She can physically feel through what she refers to as “heart flutters” and more recently, by choking, when Eleanna is troubled, anxious, and confronted with a challenging situation. This feeling she experiences, cuts through space. She feels it in real-time, no matter their positions on the globe. They can be in different continents, in different time zones. She still feels it. As an artist, living with this unique connection has guided Eleanna’s interest in phenomena outside our definable quotidian experience—the things we feel but we cannot explain. These impressions may evade our common perceptual framework, but they indelibly affect our decisions, emotions, and relationships. Just as a computer’s operating system, or motherboard, runs in the background, and it serves as a platform through which all of our other “programs” are run, even though we are not mindful of it. So to, is our own internal operating system or paradigm. We view the world through a lens and it comes with assumptions about our shared reality. In Eleanna’s work, she aims to highlight these assumptions. She wishes to bridge the gap between the corporeal and the spiritual or intangible.
Eleanna Anagnos, Negroponte, hydro-cal, acrylic, pigment, and urethane, 13” x 11” x 1”
Marisa Baumgartner b. Washington, D.C.
BIO: Marisa Baumgartner was born in Washington D.C. in 1980 and raised between Washington and Salzburg, Austria. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2002 and her Masters of Fine Arts in Photography from Yale University in 2006. She has exhibited worldwide and had her first two museum shows in the US in 2011. Marisa currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. STATEMENT: As an Austrian American I grew up between two countries, religions and cultures. Duality forms the basis for my practice as a visual artist. He/she, black/white, gay/straight, yin/yang, positive/negative, analog/digital, visible/invisible: I am interested in the formal use of the binary as a tool to mask and reveal notions of how we occupy, perceive and interpret our world. I have long conversed with the concept of using positive and negative space to experience a photographic image in an unfamiliar way. My work challenges the way we see, causing us to find abstract shapes or forms in the space between. I use the pixel in photography and the medium of painting to discuss the relationship between the two disciplines: an attempt at deconstructing abstraction in an art historical context and painterly manner via the camera lens. My formal process of obstruction reveals political discussions of the traces left behind from climate change, emotional reactions of what we hide/show of ourselves to others and to ourselves and psychological layers of distance in how we inhabit our environment. Over the past decade I have embedded into my practice my personal fascination and fear of the digital Internet age of online cameras and exchanges of images with the use of found surveillance webcams and public domain satellite pictures. I create images that are largely white or black, creating a conversation with the “white” and “black” painting of Minimalism. I use painted gold leaf on a NASA satellite image captured and manipulated by scientists to study the effects climate change has had on the water volume of rivers because visually it relates to a Gustav Klimt or Egon Schiele painting; thus a tool for using beauty to comment on the terrifying environmental crises of today.
Marisa Baumgartner, Manantali 03.24.03, silver leaf on archival inkjet print, 12� x 12�
Fatemeh Burnes b. Tehran, Iran BIO: Fatemeh Burnes first came to the United States in 1973, spent a five-year period between three continents, and settled in Southern California in 1977. Classically trained in Persian art and verse, Burnes also studied biology, modern Persian poetry, and western artistic practice – including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, art history, and exhibition design – in Iran, Europe, and ultimately in California, where she received her BFA and MFA in art and art history. Since 1992 Burnes has served as gallery director and curator as well as full-time professor of drawing and design at Mt. San Antonio College. She has curated over 100 exhibitions, authored numerous publications, conducted art-education documentaries, and worked with an international array of artists and art professionals. She has exhibited her own work nationally and internationally since the 1980s. STATEMENT: I am interested in problem-solving, not solving problems. An ingrained impulse to discover, explore, and invent drives my creative process. The science of art-making fascinates me. I make art not just to produce objects, but also to explore phenomena, whether they occur in the world or in my dreams, as thoughts in my mind or as rocks on the ground. I am preoccupied by nature, the nature around us and within us, the history we have made and the one we make, a history that is defined not by time, but by energy -- as is nature, and as is art. My artworks, in all media, offer complex levels of comprehension and aim to provoke a multiplicity of responses. I resist at every turn our tendency to simplify the world by categorizing it into kinds of things, or kinds of art. There are no categories for me, only experiences. I employ a wide variety of pictorial media. Regardless, I continually work through a process of retaining knowledge and information, producing layers of content spontaneously and then carefully finding the connections between those layers. In my painting I avoid conscious intention, and instead favor subconscious association. I develop my compositional elements by extracting, articulating, and re-inventing images generated in my initial approach. I freely combine media and modalities – carving, miniature painting, gestural abstraction, etc. – but distinguish between experimenting with process and exploring its limits. For example, working with acid and pigments on different metal surfaces satisfies my need for playful experiment. By contrast, combining different traditional practices and maintaining respect for archival methods reflects my academic training and deep investment in the history of art. Although my photography also falls into various categories of subject matter and process, I do not photograph with those distinctions in mind. I work with several different sorts of subject matter, some rather obsessively, and I look for parallels between my subjects, regardless of geographical or climatic difference. I shoot straightforward pastoral scenes – beaches, fields of flowers – and also walk through minefields in the former East Germany to capture the subtle tension of a once-tumultuous landscape. I don’t seek to document places or events with my photography, but I am very interested in light and movement, in the drama of the moment.
Fatemeh Burnes, Crossovers, oil and pigment on panel, 16� x 16� each
Cara Cole b. Vancouver, Canada
BIO: Cara’s complex photographic images both enchant and disturb, and their layered and accomplished surfaces reveal the kinds of experiences we have too few images of, and often no words for. Their carefully considered content is structured to simulate dream, or hallucinatory, states. Like such states, the images easily give rise to stories––though not simple ones and not ones with conventional narrative closures. Cara received her her undergraduate degree at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada and her MFA at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. She has received numerous grants including awards from the NEA, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Banff Writing Studio Residency. Cara has lived in Nepal, Indonesia, Romania, Turkey and Morocco. Her desire to understand cross-cultural differences, and oppression, has had crucial impact upon her work. Cara is currently completing her first novel, Dangerous Prey, which draws from her life as a photographer. STATEMENT: I am interested in the impact of time on both earthbound and celestial bodies. Time devastates flesh and rapidly consumes it. So we humans and beasts have a finite arc of time––a brief interval between birth and death––in contrast to the relative eternity of the cosmos. In performing dissections on dead beasts for this series, in peering intently at their viscera, I am struck by the grace and mystery inherent in the folds of brilliantly hued flesh, and fur and bone. This internal landscape is one of fearsome poetry. It echoes the immense and distant universe. A luminous arc of fur in darkness resembles a solar flare. Folds of flesh glow and stream like remote star fields. I must admit I do not observe this phenomena neutrally. I wish I could do more then simply dissect and expose the interior space, that secret rich place where memory and desire––a life––dwelled. I examine these interiors and wish I could perform my own miracles upon the flesh. I wish I could reverse the tide of time and bring the dead back to life, to make blood rush into the body instead of out, to inflate collapsed lungs with fresh breath, to seal gaping wounds neat and invisible like they were never there at all. ---The Sky Above, the Mud Below
Cara Cole, August Light, archival inkjet print, 15” x 32” each
Ryan Crotty b. Auburn, NE
BIO: Ryan Crotty is a visual artist and abstract painter based in rural Nebraska. He creates non-representational color field paintings rooted in the process intensive traditions of printmaking. Highlighting visual evidence of the canvas support structure, surface imperfections and materiality, he uses translucent paint to generate an interplay of light and color that challenges visual interpretation of a two-dimensional surface. Crotty earned his BFA in painting from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and his MFA in painting from Syracuse University. He has exhibited work in Nebraska, as well as New York, Chicago and Berlin. Central to his practice is time and experimentation in his studio in Auburn, NE where he resides with his family. STATEMENT: I use unconventional painting techniques to create all-over compositions of color that seem to spread out beyond the edges of the canvas. The resulting process-intensive paintings are an investigation of formal relationships. They are non-representational and forgo all suggestion of figuration. By applying layers of translucent paint, I generate aberrations in color and surface that reveal evidence of the painting as a physical object. The canvas acts as a support for pigment and binding medium that allows color and light to coalesce. Primary colors blend together to create secondary and tertiary minimalist color field paintings. ​ The stark and reductive surfaces have a tendency to be reflective and glow with meditative calm. By exploiting the emotive powers of color, I seek a pathway to serenity and reflection in these tumultuous times.
Ryan Crotty, Gray Matter, acrylic, gloss gel, and modeling paste on canvas, 24� x 20�
Robert Otto Epstein b. Pittsburgh, PA
BIO: Robert Otto Epstein studied philosophy and political science at the University of Pittsburgh and law at the University of Durham in the UK. He has shown widely in the US and Europe and has been featured in a number of publications, including: The New York Times, ELLE Magazine, VICE, Juxtapoz, The Wild Magazine, L Magazine The Jealous Curator, Design Sponge, The Chronogram, The New Criterion, Pattern Pulp, Little Paper Planes, Dwell Studio. Epstein’s work is in the corporate collections of Facebook, The Big Human, and Fidelity Investments to name a few. Epstein has curated a number of exhibitions in NYC. He currently lives and works just outside of New York City. STATEMENT: For the past several years I have been making drawings and paintings on paper and wood panel inspired by my interest in deconstructionist philosophy and design. Through my work I explore the way that repetitiveness is structured into discrete forms that are shaped by the prototype, which become the pattern, which become the system, which is itself repeating. I am equally interested in systems of production, which could be anything manmade or found in nature—pattern as a means of being or appearing by way of repeating—the pattern as an act, a process, and a product. As with each pattern, all of my work starts with a grid, and so I begin by hand-drawing a grid onto the surface. Then I create a blueprint in advance, based on various geometric ideas and color choices. At times I employ chance into the decision making process - literally rolling dice and painting the color that I’ve assigned to a given number. I then paint each pattern square-by-square and row-by-row, working from the bottom right corner across each row and then up the paper.
Robert Otto Epstein, 25,168 Squares, colored pencil on paper, 22� x 18�
Francisco Esnayra b. Chihuahua, Mexico
BIO: Esnayra studied Fine Arts at the Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua and the Universidad Autónoma de Mexico. In 2013 he also completed the sculpture workshop at the Washington University Center in Rome. Drawing on classical sculpture, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Messerschmidt’s character heads, along with commonplace objects such as teddy bears or pill capsules, Esnayra produces compelling portrayals of human emotion, rich in texture and colour. His figures address the subjectivity with which we relate to others, the role of medicines in our mental and physical wellbeing or the basic human need for introspection. STATEMENT: The work of Francsico Esnayra consists mainly of sculptures that seek to externalize, through the plasticity of his materials, the contemporary state of the human condition. Esnayra has developed throughout his practice multiple self-portraits that explore various emotional states evidenced in the anatomical gesticulation of the face. He also employs different visual metaphors with the representation of everyday objects that seek to formulate new strategies of introspective reflection from a three-dimensional format. His work raises the question of the interconnection between mind, body, and spirit in an imaginary way; making conscious emotionality and rediscovering it in a formal way.
Francisco Esnayra, Capsule of Self-Destruction IV, cast resin, 18.5” x 7.5” x 6.75”
Peter Fox b. Philadelphia, PA
BIO: Peter Fox’s work has been exhibited throughout the US and internationally, in numerous gallery, institutional, and museum contexts, including Front Room, Pierogi, Roebling Hall and Janet Kurnatowski Gallery (NYC), Beta Pictoris Gallery (Birmingham, AL), Curator’s Office (Washington, DC), Scott Richards Contemporary Art (San Francisco), Good Citizen (St. Louis), Magazzino d’Arte Moderna (Rome), The New Hampshire Institute of Art, The Washington State University Galleries, The University Art Museum at SUNY and Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul, (Porto Alegre, Brazil), where it is in the permanent collection. His work has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Salon, Artcritical, Hyperallergic, The Washington Post, Artnet, ArtNotes, Segno and TimeOut Roma, among other publications. He received his MFA in painting from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia/Rome and lives and works in New York. STATEMENT: My current spilled paint project has roots in my earlier dripped paint work. Both explore languages of relational color, mediated through formal systems referencing Abstract Painting, articulated through layered processes testing difference and repetition, in turn evolved through chance. In both cases, formal Abstraction is employed second-hand as a distancing device – like a second language - to at once depersonalize, objectivize and consequently (perhaps paradoxically) locate a more immediate field of intellectual and emotive contact. While the dripped paint project is point-based, evoking pixelated color systems, the current spilled paint project explores line, as an alternate ‘pixel’ for establishing color relationships, as a drawing device, and for the voice available in line itself. The literally fluid line evokes aspects of surrealist figuration within a graphic reference space that includes psychedelia, graffiti and anime. The tension between factual presence and implicit illusion is fundamental to the work. Like composite Rorschachs, the work demands and defies narrative attachment with the same gesture.
Peter Fox, No Title (Rigor), acrylic on canvas, 76” x 38”
Theresa Hackett b. Los Angeles, CA
BIO: Theresa Hackett received her BFA from College of Creative Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara and her MFA at Hunter College, New York. Hackett works in non-conventional materials to create hybrid landscapes where still life and abstraction merge. She diffuses language and creates unpredictable compositions that rely on intuition, and waver between the unconscious and the subliminal to create a complex mixology of visual play. Recently, Hackett was awarded her second Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, a MacDowell Residency, and she received a NYFA Fellowship in 2009. She has had numerous solo shows and has participated in many group shows and museum projects; such as “NewView,” at the Contemporary Museum of Art in Baltimore; “Art on Paper,” at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; and “Starting Here: A Selection of Distinguished Artists from UCSB,” Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA. STATEMENT: For many years now I have been introducing new materials to my work. I find that one material can activate a dialogue with another and can create certain tensions. My work is a philosophical inquiry; I use the language of abstraction, blending it with the pictorial and pastoral, to create hybrid, textural landscapes. Painting as a language presents itself as a game for me to dissect; it enables me to play within its delicate balance. I have always been interested in creating an environment for my paintings, either through transforming the gallery space into an installation, or introducing three-dimensional sculptural objects to engage in a relationship with a two-dimensional work. I find that this dialogue between installation and painting creates a certain dialectic that offers the opportunity to form a broader interpretation of the work. The work that I make is a collection of unpredictable forms, one that produces an intimate relationship between the act of painting, the unconscious and intuition. In the last four decades I have committed much of my studio practice to a mixology; an alchemy which tends to direct the composition toward visual play, a paronomasia of textural complexities and surface variations. My paintings are problems that I construct for myself and try to solve through exploration and experimentation. Formal decisions bounce back and forth, the past and present are analyzed; this process creates a visual recording and evidence of decision making. The surface I work with becomes a “wearing down” of time, a form of weathering an articulation of memory. This re-contextualizing is a process which is shaped by continual questioning, and by constant construction and deconstruction. This is the basis of my painting practice, it is a place where I create temporality, construct elements that contain time and form personal histories.
Theresa Hackett, DNA Memories, Flashe, resin, photographs, marble dust, acrylic, colored pencil, marker, silver leaf, whisky, coffee, ink, and gesso on BFK paper mounted to linen, 48� x 30�
Mary Jones b. Granite Falls, NC
BIO: Mary Jones received a BFA and MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She began her career in Los Angeles and has been living and working in NYC since 1986. Jones has shown her work in galleries and museums internationally, most recently at John Molloy Gallery in NYC in 2016. Other exhibitions include the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Ovsey Gallery, Cugliani Gallery, Jeffrey Coploff Fine Art, Robert Green Fine Arts, Marlborough Chelsea, and Cenci Gallery, Rome. She is in many notable collections, including the Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles. Her work has been reviewed in the NY Times, LA Times, Art in America, Artforum, and Artnews among others and is included in the book, “L.A.Rising, SoCal Artists Before 1980”, by Lyn Kienholz. Jones is a Senior Critic at RISD, where she has taught since 1998, and an instructor at SVA since 2009. As an art writer, she has also contributed to bombmagazine.org since 2009, and recently for artcritical.com, interviewing artists about their work and process. STATEMENT: Writing about painting in a New Yorker review, critic Peter Schjeldahl says, “No other medium can as yet so directly combine vision and touch to express what it’s like to have a particular mind, with its singular troubles and glories, in a particular body.” This seems especially relevant to me. I rely on process and layering to invite a psychological reading, at the edge of my control, that haptically connects to a shared consciousness. My paintings find fragments of recognizable form through an intuitive process of layered abstraction. They’re heavily worked and, along with courting improvisation and spontaneity, I’ve begun to embrace metaphors of biography as part of the content. It’s a physical process and reinforces a bodily connection; scraping, sanding, collage, industrial spray paint and house paint rollers are all utilized, embedding the motions, ghosts, construction and destruction that each painting undergoes as part of the facture. The colors refer to earth, clay, and sky, but the natural color is jolted with the synthetic fluorescent orange of industry. I use commercial paint rollers and spray paint to simultaneously reference both the gesture of making a mark and its erasure to signify one’s individuation. This double function not only charts my movement across the canvas but also represents a cancellation, a ground for a new beginning, in the way that graffiti is painted out with primer on an urban wall. In a series of works on paper, I repurpose--through collage--the stencils that I made as tools for paintings 15 years ago. These are worn, spattered with paint, and fully representative of their studio function and history. As with the roller works, the repurposed stencils cover my gestures, a reversal of their original function. I work to make a syntheses of the old and new, a literal layering of history. And the process has recently expanded. I’m using a trove of X-rays from my late in-laws. These paintings are constructed as portraits so that another kind of reversal is created--the experience of seeing the inside of someone first. The X-rays also mask the abstraction behind the images. There’s a confrontation with the transgressive technological infiltration into our lives and the radiation we submit to for all kinds of reasons. Through process, the sense of the hand and the archeology of time and materials can bring painter and viewer together in an act that enlivens imagination. The work becomes a kind of biography.
Mary Jones, Metal and Mirrors, oil, x-ray, aluminum leaf, duralar, and spray enamel on canvas, 30� x 26�
Jill Levine b. New York, NY
BIO: Jill Levine is a native New Yorker. She attended Queens College, where she earned her BA and also received a fellowship to the Yale Summer School of Art at Norfolk, CT. She earned her MFA from the Yale University School of Art, which included a semester at the Royal College of Art in London. She has been exhibiting regularly since the late 1970’s in both group and solo exhibitions. In 2000 she was the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2005 a NYFA Fellowship. Her sculpture is included among numerous private and corporate collections worldwide as well as in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Art in Embassies, Mumbai Embassy. She lives and works in New York. STATEMENT: For many years I have explored the territory between painting and sculpture. The sculptures hang on the wall. They are built from pre-cut Styrofoam shapes that are tooth picked together, eventually glued into place and covered with rigid wrap and modeling compound. The image is drawn, sometimes projected and painted with oil paint. For years, the sculptures always had a human scale, kind of a half torso size, but my work has always had a playful side and the idea of symmetry pushed me towards sculptures that were more of a hybrid between the animal/human worlds. Over the years the forms have morphed from built up globular, exploding structures to a simpler format. The current work is comprised of symmetrical shapes that take on a more totemic feeling. I have been travelling to Mexico for the past twenty years and have incorporated my interest in Pre -Columbian art into the work. These sculptures reference images from Mexican codices, as well as ceramics and sculpture from various sites. The sources for color that warps and weaves across the forms are often found in serapes. Drawing is laid over the horizontal bands creating multiple visual layers. For example in “Frazada”, a lacey Day of the Dead image painted in black lies on top of bands of vibrant color. Other sculptures reference insects, animals or the death god, Mictlantecuhtli. Although the sculptures seem to belong to a common clan they maintain their individuality.
Jill Levine, Estrella, styrofoam, plaster dipped gauze, modeling compound, oil, 23.5” x 12” x 10.5”
Daina Mattis b. Los Angeles, CA
BIO: Daina Mattis creates drawings, paintings and sculptures that examine the representation of visual language and how the viewer mitigates the marriage of image, process and concept. Her choice of materials and imagery creates subdialogues connecting time, patterns and humanity, as well as exploring innovative methods of visual communication. These works aim to expose not what we are looking at but how we are looking. Mattis is a Brooklyn based visual artist and the youngest of four children to Lithuanian immigrants. Her experiences in a bilingual, culturally rich home in Los Angeles greatly influence her work and how she explores visual language. STATEMENT: My work focuses on social relationships. Not specifically mine, nor any particular individual’s, but rather from a macro-perspective. I am a visual artist who creates drawings, paintings and sculptures using the monolithic and iconic to better understand our being/presence outside of our singular bodies. My work has evolved from the individual confines of identity and narrative towards exploring collective behavior and metaphysics. As human beings, our identities vary as much as our fingerprints, yet I believe we find unity in detachment; understanding with repetition; embrace in mutation; and change with reflection. My goal is to expound on our ancestral connections and the significance of our mutual relationships by creating art works that reflect mankind. The choice of materials and imagery creates a sub-dialogue connecting time, patterns and humanity, as well as exploring innovative ways of visually communicating. The theme for my current body of work includes our perception of sight and touch with time. In my practice, the activity of drawing is about repetition and pattern. It is a slow, habitual, calculated, and a multi-sensory activity. There is a constant flux of pressure, motion and overlap where time is materialized into line, creating a visual abacus. Transparency is a hallmark of drawing; even after the physical act has ceased, the process is visible. I am interested in how the physical marks transform, folding image and line into an object describing time. These works focus on turning the intimate inside out, where internal and external coexist, questioning nurture over nature in the fold of individual and universal topics. In addition to these drawings is an installation of hand sewn paper gloves. Giving physical shape to the work’s objective, the paper gloves allude to drawing’s multi-dimensional possibilities. Paper is conventionally used as a surface to create two-dimensional images, but it can be physically altered into a third dimension, adjusting the material’s purpose. Fragile in nature, the paper as material is antithetical to the function of a glove while also relating drawing to touch, gleaning concepts from Jacques Derrida’s essays, Memoirs of the Blind in which he theorizes the act of seeing as blindness and the act of vision as touch. The metaphor of the glove shares the same skin yet one side turned inside out can never see the other. Although this personal blindness is inescapable, new vision/perception is created as “the eye” is turned inside out. Altering our perception of these senses provides a new consciousness and depth to familiar objects.
Daina Mattis, Krab, oil on linen mounted to panel, 31� x 30�
James Miller b. Spokane, WA
BIO: James Miller received his BFA at the Laguna College of Art and Design, Laguna Beach, CA and his MFA at the Yale School of Art, Newhaven CT. He has exhibited on both coasts and was the recipient of the Dedalus Foundation Fellowship in 2015. Miller’s cathartic, atmospheric paintings are experimental and in constant flux, while being rooted in an education in classical painting and methodology. His work is a way to explore the concept of image making and the materiality of paint from an art historical context by constructing and deconstructing subject matter and light phenomena, often incorporating elements of printmaking and airbrushing. Miller currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. STATEMENT: I am zipped inside of a Tyvek suit, upright under a tent staring. And now you’re here with me, in eye. Or shadow. Light filters through glass; through all the plastic and fluorescent paint and shit on the ground; through some airborne dust. Particles disperse and settle. I identify as a painter, but I encounter the studio as a piece of technology—an apparatus—rather than as a more traditional space designated for easel painting. My working method is hybrid: I combine direct and indirect painting, printmaking methods, and a modified airbrush technique. Objects placed tangentially to the canvas act as stencils, blocking applied paint to create a visual registration of time (the impressions of light and shadow, tracking motion, retinal afterimages). While insistently painterly, these canvases are fixed traces calling to mind filmic artifacts, blueprints, and x-rays. In this way, the work’s content is connected not only to reflexive spaces of modernist painting and drawing, but to image processing itself. This impulse to hijack or reroute technical constructs, has cultural and personal meaning for me, as it connects disparate strategies throughout art history with my earliest personal experiences as a maker. My aesthetic curiosity and knowledge of materials began with my upbringing in the Pacific Northwest where I spent my teenage years and early twenties working construction on spec homes. Routinized cycles of demolition, landscaping, and building have invested me with a visual and tactile inclination to deconstruct and alter the environment around me. Painting is a way to record and transform my interaction with the material history, structures, and environmental detritus around my home and studio. I scavenge, combine, and subtract found forms, literally building and demolishing a painting’s composition over the course of its making. As in construction work, I paint on a scale that is decided by my body, so as to become a performer or a painting implement myself. I am both a studio artist interested in controlled visual research and a wandering collector open to chance encounters, in the vein of radical conceptual projects like Surrealist frottage, Schwitters‘ Merzing, and Situationist détournement. Through this experimental approach, I am developing questions about painting’s engagement with the history of photographic media and conceptual art, while recording the surreal residue of my local landscape.
James Miller, Untitled, acrylic and bleach on canvas, 68” x 48”
Bobbie Oliver b. Windsor, Canada
BIO: Bobbie Oliver lives and works in New York City and Rock Valley, NY. She has exhibited in New York at Hionas Gallery, Feature Gallery, Showroom, and Valentine Gallery as well as exhibiting in Toronto at Olga Korper Gallery, in Los Angeles at Jancar Gallery and The George Gallery in Laguna Beach. Bobbie has received awards from The Canada Council, New York State Council for the Arts, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation. STATEMENT: I have always been attracted to painting that is very direct and gestural like Chinese landscape painting or Japanese calligraphy. I also appreciate very quiet solid painting as in Morandi or Roman fresco painting. Somewhere between these two different attitudes, I find my own ground in the emotional quality of mark and gesture with the juxtaposition of large scale: a statement of nuanced possibilities. This position comes about through a commitment to a very physical and immediate way of working. I work with and pay close attention to: how the paint sits on the surface, whether it sits on top or sinks in, whether it feels better to blot some off and put that which is blotted off elsewhere on the painting, whether I thin the paint to a wash or make it richer and denser; all rather ordinary activities that get addressed until slowly a tactile kind of space and simplicity/complexity emerges. I don’t have any preconceived plan for the painting’s resolution but look for richness in relationships, rhythms and densities. An attention to opposites interests me: sharp against soft, dense against washy. Ultimately, no matter how long I have worked on a painting I want it to have a direct and fresh feeling. Trips to India in the 1990’s influenced my grasp of color and it’s powerful effect and it has become a larger part of my work and vision. Seeing the colored spices and powders in the markets and the impact of dense, colored shapes felt very powerful to me. The natural world is important to me but my paintings are more about what happens in the process of working, looking and reacting.
Bobbie Oliver, Tracing, acrylic on canvas, 72” x 48”
Colin Thomson b. London, England
BIO: Colin Thomson was born in London, England and moved to New York in 1955. He attended Lake Forest College, BA, 1971, The New York Studio School, 1972-1975, Skowhegan School of Art, 1974, and Yale University, MFA, 1977. He’s been included in multiple group shows and presented nine solo exhibitions in venues including: Plot Lines, 2014, Outlet Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Local Color, 2011 Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford, Republic of Ireland; 100 Broadway, 2003, New York, NY; Nina Freudenheim Gallery, 1992/1987, Buffalo, NY; Projects Room, David Beitzel Gallery, 1992, New York, NY; Lieberman & Saul Gallery, 1991/1989, New York, NY; Winston Gallery, 1986, Washington, D.C. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1991-1992. Public and corporate collections include Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Centro Culturale, Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Chase Manhattan Bank, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, M & T Bank, National Madison Group, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, and Wilkie, Farr & Gallagher. STATEMENT: My painting ideas develop through drawings and watercolors. Sources include Islamic tiles, graphic design, African textiles, architectural plans, maps, cartoons, and the landscape. The work process is a simple back and forth, exploring options and consequences, contradictions and ambiguities. The results possess an animated and lively quality, full of idiosyncrasies that resist any easy identification. An overall sense of playfulness belies a more serious investigation of light and space, colour and drawing. The paintings create their own location, a meditative and natural parallel to the world I’m experiencing. Each one looks for a voice, a context for the individual parts, joining thought and action, material and idea.
Colin Thomson, Gate, oil on canvas, 52” x 48”
Hanna Von Goeler b. Marburg an der Lahn, Germany
BIO: Hanna von Goeler received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Davis. She completed additional study at the Jan van Eyck Academy, an international post graduate program in the Netherlands. Born in Europe, Von Goeler’s family moved to the United States while she was an infant. Her father worked as a physicist at Princeton University. The international atmosphere there, as well as her bilingual upbringing and frequent travels led to her preoccupation with the fluidity of identity, culture, and perception. Her parents’ wartime experiences, as well, influence her work and perspective. Her work has been been shown internationally and featured in publications such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. STATEMENT: My work focuses on what’s “between”. The interstitial, ambiguous, complex, transitory, changing, mystic, hybrid, un-named. The spaces outside of those structures we’ve already created to define and order our world. In order to explore between-ness, I often work with existing structures in ways that accentuate what lies beyond them. This is central to “co-dependent arising” — the concept that things arise and change in relationship to one another. Structures such as categorization, naming, language, territory, architecture, mimicry, boundaries, beauty, and material and mental attachments of all sorts are often the source of entrapments and contradictions, which are the starting point for my work. In attempting to find and explore what is between there is always the risk of creating new entrapments. This becomes part of the texture of the work. Primarily a conceptual and project-based artist, I also explore my interests in smaller pieces and sketches. My work incorporates a wide range of media and influences, allowing hybrid forms to emerge.
Hanna Von Goeler, Migration series, watercolor and gouache on defunct currency, dimensions variable
Lindsay Walt b. Rochester, MN
BIO: Lindsay Walt received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA from The Art Institute of Chicago. Additionally, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship. Her work is included is the U.S. Embassy in Djibouti, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the New York Public Library, Yale University of Art, amongst others. Using the inherent viscosity of paint, fluid washes of saturated color are applied to the picture surface like ceramic glaze. Building from the edge inwards, delicate marks are woven together to form a network of elaborate configurations based on Walt’s continued interest in ornamental arts as well as Chinese landscapes, Japanese screens, and Islamic tiles. STATEMENT: A starting point for inspiration in my work is the perceptual shift of color and light found in natural phenomena. Often, the abstract compositions in the paintings reference landscape and seascape, particularly the amorphous border where the two merge. Other works allude to a state of weightlessness free from the constraints of gravity. Using the inherent viscosity of paint, fluid washes of saturated color are applied to the picture surface like ceramic glaze. Building from the edge inwards, delicate marks are woven together to form a network of elaborate configurations based on my continued interest in ornamental arts as well as Chinese landscapes, Japanese screens, and Islamic tiles. Throughout, there is an intuitive quirky formalism where gesture and formal restraint, precision and happenstance coexist. The meandering work process is meditative in nature: breath and hand work in tandem - to paint a line is to draw a breath - to paint a string of beads is to map the fleeting passage of time. To get lost and found and lost again is an essential part of the experience.
Lindsay Walt, Strata 14, watercolor on paper, 30” x 22.5”
The Painted Desert EDITION OF 100 Curated by Jared Linge Part I, October 5 - November 12, 2017 Part II, November 16 - December 24, 2017
Publisher: Jared Linge HIGH NOON GALLERY 106 Eldridge St New York, NY 10002 Foreward @ Jared Linge 2017 Essay @ Elena Goukassian 2017 Design @ Jared Linge Printer: ATC Images 101 Allen Street New York, NY 10002 All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reprinted or reproduced in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying or recording, or in any information retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher.