Rhode Island School of Design 2016 MFA Painting Thesis July 7 - 22, 2016
nancy margolis gallery
RISD 2016 MFA PAINTING THESIS July 7 - 20, 2016
Rosalind Breen, Danny Ferrell, Syraya Horton, Tristram Lansdowne, Stuart Lantry, Shona McAndrew Okoshken, Jagdeep Raina, Paul Rouphail, Ziyang Wu, Ping Zheng Nancy Margolis Gallery is pleased to announce the Rhode Island School of Design’s MFA Painting Thesis exhibition will be on view July 7 through July 22, 2016. The opening reception will take place on Thursday, July 7, 6-8pm. 20 EYES IN MY HEAD by Dennis Congdon This show presents the most recent work of ten young artists who have spent their last two years working on Master's degrees in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. There is no single organizing theme behind this exhibition, but these ten very different artists form a creative nexus...and they do so in two senses. Certainly their cohort can be described as such, but so can the studio of each. Each brings a fresh sense of possibility and renewal to their work -most often more poetic than polemic. Each is unafraid of a mash-up or synthesis of familiar parts into a new whole never seen before. Rosalind Breen lifts the world of the fairy tale up to a place neither edenic nor doomed. Employing a touch with the strength of restraint, her large drawings develop the shimmering materiality of the silver screen. These layered works unfurl with a wry sense of humor that masks a sober determination to deliver us from the doldrums. Danny Ferrell- In his new paintings he looks at flesh, fabric, and frission as Ingres might have had he spent more time on the beach studying tattoos. Unbuttoned, with rolled-up sleeves these figures know it is better to glow than sweat. Ferrell admires Cadmus and Tooker and follows their lead to bring together the epic and banal in his work. Syraya Horton's collaged and painted works on paper pose as posters with platitudes urging self improvement- up from the sofa, down on the yoga mat- but after we turn away- a boomerang strikes. These are angry works that demand a closer look at where social media, selfie culture, and self-surveillance have begun to lead. Shona McAndrew Okoshken makes paintings, drawings, and photographs of full-size women and her newest works are sculptures. She has described her route as from two-dimensional representations of real women to actual realizations of imagined women. McAndrew's imagined women in their private moments are generous and in a world where more loved can become most...les plus belles.
Tristram Lansdowne situates his watercolor paintings of modern villas at the fulcrum point between aspects of an architecture that attracts us but does not welcome us. Working with aplomb under a most elegant surface he manipulates perspective and how an image unfolds to access spatial ambiguity, discontinuity, and the uncanny. Ping Zheng in her new abstract paintings has explored a personal connection to what she has called "the outside natural world and the inside natural world". Exploring memories- both physical and emotional- and synthesizing her experiences out of doors today, she has developed a visual language that is ever-mutable, always deep-rooted. These are paintings that can be by turns transcendent, uplifting, buoyant, or earthbound. With color, light, and touch- soul is given voice. Stuart Lantry's studio is a staging area for performance and installation and a shop producing mad machines, complicated contraptions that create their own purpose and thereby solve in a sense a problem of their own devise. Turning 'purposeful' on its head Lantry's inventions each present a loop- his bright response to a dark world under duress. He puts us on a Mobius treadmill on which we must ask 'where are we going?' Jagdeep Raina’s large works on paper stretch wide from side to side but align themselves with the riches of the margins as these are heartfelt works dedicated to the highs and lows of refugees exiled in estranged landscapes. Exploring the diaspora and the resilience of Punjabi culture, Raina combines archivist persistence and researcher memory to become the soulful artist who looks ahead. Paul Rouphail's painting draws a viewer into a world where architecture, advertisement, and news imagery meet pop iconography, emoticons, neon, and mustard. His work is a site from which shiny skyscrapers rise and reflect a painted world where we are offered a firm reminder that Poetry is Vertical and the 3rd Estate collides with the 5th. Ziyang Wu- With black humor and a seriousness that could be called deadly Wu uses video, installation, and performance to bring a new dawn. Under the banner "Absurd Carnival" he projects operatic works of feverish tumult and fugue-like polyphonics. May 1st, 2016
ROSALIND BREEN
Gatekeeper, 2016, Pastel on paper, 60”x72”
My drawings, paintings, and sculptures explore ideas of empathy and film archetypes as shared through contemporary pop culture. I am fascinated by narrative tropes and how they are survived and perpetuated throughout history. My work locates these conditions in their contemporary manifestation: the internet. The stories and characters shared through Netflix, for example, evince a visual form that is constantly morphing. The spirit and story they embody, however, stays the same. It evokes longing and desire present in all people, and that is why they are kept alive even today, through technology and through my work. — Rosalind Breen
DANNY FERRELL
Seaman, 2016, Oil on canvas on panel, 11” x 14” (left) Justine, 2016, Oil on canvas on panel, 11” x 14” (right)
Danny Ferrell, Trip to the Store, 2016, Oil on canvas on papnel, 40” x 30”
My paintings represent fantasies and fears about the Other through depictions of everyday queer male experience. I am enamored with the potential intrusion of queerness in the everyday, and look for it wherever I go. Homoerotic currents in contemporary American life can be found everywhere: in visual stereotypes, the sky as a rainbow gradient at sunset, a discarded pair of gym shorts, or the reflection of two men kissing on a soda can. I find and compose paintings that deliver the energy and realism of daily life, while imbuing it with a homoerotic flirtation. A formal and conceptual tension is always at play, which is structured and informed by everpresent dichotomies: public/private, nature/culture, taste/kitsch, transparency/opacity. Loosely based on my own relationships, experiences, and imagination, my work functions like a daydream, where memory, longing, and external influences shape a personal fiction. — Danny Ferrell
SYRAYA HORTON
With Enough Patience And Practice, I will Someday Literally Be Able To Crawl Up My Own Ass, 2016, Mixed media on paper, 21” x 29”
Syraya Horton, Just Be You, 2016, Mixed media on paper, 21” x 29”
Through painting, photography, and collage, my work negotiates the spaces through which social media captivates women and their presentation of their lives and bodies. In the US and most Anglophone countries, the most popular type of circulated female imagery is largely white, slender, and young. In the dominant culture these women had been comparing themselves to glamorized imagery of models on television and magazines, buy they are now also comparing themselves to the bodies and lives of people they see on social media. Women are taught from birth to be visually appealing, that their bodies are projects always needing work to get closer to an ideal that is never quite attainable. Social gatherings, beautiful destinations, even the privacy of one’s home are no longer to be experienced, but rather rendered as a backdrop for what makes a life and body look attractive, interesting, and enviable. — Syraya Horton
JAGDEEP RAINA
Jasmeet, Sweet Brother, 2016, Mixed media on paper, 26” x 40”
Jagdeep Raina, Our Backs Tell Stories No Books Have the Spine to Carry, Women of Colour, 2016, Mixed media on paper, 22”x30”
The precarious history of Punjabi communities exists in overlooked archives: books, oral history manuscripts, VHS tapes, records, and cassettes tucked away in cardboard boxes, yellow photographs in peeling albums stuffed in cupboards and shelves, in basements, on sporadic online databases, and in the research of quiet scholars who have dedicated their lives to painstakingly recording a history lived in the margins. My drawings depict the psychologically fraught landscapes of people living in a place so unsettlingly foreign—their melancholic private interiors, the proudly built Sikh temples, and the domestic and material cultures of the lives they have led and continue to lead. — Jagdeep Raina
TRISTRAM LANSDOWNE
Hearth 1, 2016, Watercolor on paper, 27” x 26”
Tristram Lansdowne, Perpetual Growth, 2016, Watercolor on paper, 34.5”x 27.5”
The utopian current that runs through art and design history is the focus of my practice. Drawing from disparate systems of visual organization such as Renaissance taxonomical and perspectival systems, Romantic painting, utopian architectural concepts and scientific illustration, my work has focused on exploring the desire for control within such idealized constructions. My interest here lies in their metaphorical power, in the ways they express the psychological and spiritual aspirations of a society. I am currently working with images of contemporary domestic spaces, rearranging their spatial order and reconfiguring the layers of artifice and illusion within them. By focusing on the optical experiences of these things, I hope to take stock of inherited notions of them in relation to taste, simulation, and modernist narratives of form and function. An awareness of the physical instability of one’s position in the world, both psychically and historically, is at the heart of this inquiry, and as such I am considering representational space alternately as escape, as ideal and as trap. — Tristram Lansdowne
STUART LANTRY
Water Modul: Model #23, 2016, Color digital video with sound, 5 min. 6 sec. just reagrranging the dirt, 2016, Color digital video with sound, 6 min. 42 sec.
Stuart Lantry, Water Modul: Model #23, 2016, Mixed media, 26”x 9”x 15”
My work dramatizes and explores the psychological effects of our relationship to the built environment. This complex network of towers, streets, wires and pipes simultaneously defines and reflects a history of power alongside the daily routines and aesthetic impulses of the people living within it. Yet, for all modern infrastructure's utopian overtones and supposed hegemony over nature, life in urban spaces seems defined by an aimless entropy. To contend with this absurd contradiction, my practice exists in a propositional future without access to this infrastructure. Within the parameters of this world, I establish closed-loop systems designed to hover between failure and function. — Stuart Lantry
SHONA MCANDREW
Looking, 2016, Ink jet print, 24” x 18” (left) Waiting, 2016, Ink jet print, 24” x 18” (right)
Shona McAndrew, Sofia, 2016, Paper mache, aluminum wire, acrylic and linen, 30” x 38” x 26”
In my work I seek to discover what it means to be a woman, particularly one who does not fit many of today’s beauty standards. My sculptures and photographs draw on an evolving relationship to both the Body-Positive community and my own plus-size body. My work engages with broader representations of women in our culture, as well as a specific conversation regarding overweight women. Unconventional bodies are not just “before” pictures. They are bodies in the present— bodies that are just as worthy, just as experienced, just as valid. — Shona McAndrew
PAUL ROUPHAIL
Treasure Hunt, 2016, Oil on linen, 47” x 47”
Paul Rouphail, Rondo, 2016, Oil on linen, 35.25” x 49”
My work fuses architectural history, American vernacular, and turns of phrase. I am interested in colloquial American phrases, their extraction from disparate dialects and their subsequent metamorphoses into commonplace rhetoric. The layered paintings examine slippages in textual translation where particular colloquialisms merge with everyday environments. Text, emoticons, and advertisement graphics populate domestic interiors and high-rise facades, take-out containers and digitally synthesized landscapes. My paintings disrupt the mechanics of commercial "place" as "practiced space” where real-estate speculation adopts selective historical narrative.1 I am interested in examining commonplace material surfaces specific to the history of American trompe-l’oeil painting. In my paintings, surfaces such as storefront windows and wood paneling are adorned with neon, condiments, and paper cutouts. These are simultaneously arranged as irregular cultural conflations: family postcards mediated through advertisement imagery, emoticons translated through filmic tropes, Anglo-Spanish (a bifurcation from Spanglish) strategically embedded within commercial language. All of these extend the dialectic of Frederic Jameson’s “symbolic act”2 for which a “work” is at once lyrical—that is, activated though color, facture, and autobiography—or indicative of an act in which the image is an imposter, made obliquely referential, objectively ironic, or explicitly didactic. I see my paintings functioning somewhere in-between these polarities where moments of depiction and translation are tightly interlocked. — Paul Rouphail
1 Mitchell, J.W.T. “Imperial Landscape.” Landscape and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002. p. 7-12 2 Jameson, Frederic. “The Brick and the Balloon.” The Cultural Turn: Selected Writing on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. Verso. New York 2009. p 183
ZIYANG WU
The Story of The Pig, 2016, Color digital video with sound, 8min. 42sec.
Ziyang Wu, Peng Ci (Staged Crash), 2015, Color digital video with sound, 4min. 5 sec.
I have noticed a force in contemporary China. The politics of a feudal empire and the power of capitalist business culture enables individuals’ values and rationality to nearly disappear in the details of everyday life. I call this phenomenon ‘micro-alienation’ and try to express my complicated feelings toward it through my work. Through an interdisciplinary practice, my work is a meditation on everyday narratives, mixed with personal experiences, self-hallucinations and cultural readings. I insist that art should put forward a kind of non-systematic and nondisciplinary visual thinking to touch the audience’s nerve that is hypnotized by society. Themes of the absurd and the carnival also allow this culturally specific critique to become further indulgent and subversive. — Ziyang Wu
PING ZHENG
Untitled, 2016, Oil on canvas, 60” x 52”
Ping Zheng, Untitled 2, 2015, Oil on canvas, 30” 30”
Growing up in China, I was surrounded by many different geographical regions, populated by starkly contrasting natural environments. My inspiration is grounded in my memories of these natural landscapes. My time studying abroad in London and the United States, however, has triggered an awareness of the power of freedom and imagination that shapes my world, connecting my childhood fascination with natural environments to my artistic practice. Recently, I have gotten closer to the essence of what landscape means to me. It is a place where memories of past and present are virginally created. By this measure I am interested in the ambiguity of an inner landscape. My painted forms are made with a modernist, elementally pictorial strategy. They may evoke mountains, islands, or heads, and frame our view into suggested landscape spaces. I hope my paintings invite viewers to look in to them, while they gaze out at us in return. — Ping Zheng
Please contact the gallery for more information: margolis@nancymargolisgallery.com 212 242 3013 523 W. 25th Street. New York. NY 10001 www.nancymargolisgallery.com
nancy margolis gallery Catalog Š 2016 NANCY MARGOLIS GALLERY Coutesy of Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any other means, electronic or mechanical now known or hereafter invented, without written permission of publisher.