PROJECT 19: The Prolonged Gaze

ZEPHYR GALLERY

PROJECT

19

The Prolonged Gaze September 1 - October 22, 2017

Checklist

Tiffany Calvert

Untitled (Purple Green), 2015 Oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches Untitled #278, 2017 Oil on digital print on canvas 16 x 20 inches Untitled #287, 2017 Oil on digital print on canvas 48 x 60 inches

Vian Sora

Vespertine, 2016-2017 Mixed media on arches paper 51 ½ x 85 inches

Nhat Tran

THE CYCLE OF UPS AND DOWNS, 2016 Urushi Japanese natural lacquer on burl tree and particle wood powder.

40 x 18 x 18 inches EXHALING THE FRAGRANCE, 2016 Urushi Japanese natural lacquer on wood.

24 x 30 x 4.3 inches INCLINATION TO BELIEVE, 2004 Urushi Japanese natural lacquer on extruded polystyrene.

24 x 14 x 9 inches

Tigris, 2017 Mixed media on arches paper 50 x 37 ½ inches [Untitled - Two figures], 2017 Mixed media on arches paper 37 ½ x 49 inches Maze 1, 2016 Mixed media on canvas paper 51 ½ x 51 inches [Series of three drawings], 2017 Acrylic and sumi ink on paper 28 x 22 ½ inches [Series of six paintings], 2017 Mixed media on panel 10 x 10 inches [Landscape with a Moth], 2017 Acrylic on canvas 48 x 48 inches

Vian Sora

Maze 1, 2016 Mixed media on canvas paper 51 ½ x 51 inches

[Blue Square Abstract with Black Figure], 2017 Mixed media on canvas 48 x 48 Inches

The Prolonged Gaze The three artists in this exhibition paint in a manner that bends, challenges, and expands our understanding of painting. Employing a wide range of techniques, their works use vibrant color, high contrast, and at times beauty to create forms which slide between figuration and abstraction. Their art is an invitation to explore the formal richness that is possible through painting. At the same time, these artworks contain a wealth of personal and historical narratives, embedded within the paintings’ layers and distorted forms. Slipping inside and outside of recognizability, these images subscribe to the adage: “more you look, the more you see.” These artworks reward looking longer, and by doing so encourage the viewer to take a more perceptive view towards the rest of the world.

Vian Sora’s bold paintings contain the inviting and the grotesque. Though they are largely abstract, her images contain suggestions of figures and places. We are taken through gardens and warzones, landscapes of lush fertility and terrible decay, and cycles of life and death. Sora’s work is informed by her life. The artist was raised in Baghdad, survived the Iraq War, worked for the Associated Press, and now lives in Louisville. Sora’s visions fuse her own experiences with fairytales, Iraqi history, traditional Islamic influences, and painterly abstraction. In Tigris, for example, a green opening through her lavender forms reveals the shape of a ram’s head. A deity in ancient Mesopotamia, the ram is a symbol of hope and new beginnings, and for Sora, hope for the city of Mosul, which has recently been freed from the so-called Islamic State or ISIS. In Vespertine, a panoramic abstract landscape, Sora’s memories of her grandmother’s garden blend with the sentiment of loss, and of nature left unchecked. These recent works reflect the artist’s latest experiments with abstraction and bright neon colors.

Tiffany Calvert’s intricate floral paintings are far more than pretty flowers. Having studied the history of painting and design going back to the eighteenth century, Calvert mines rococo interiors and Dutch and Flemish still lifes for examples of opulence and decadent levels of detail. In her paintings Calvert recreates Dutch still lifes in a twenty-first century style, which exhibits the influences of Abstract Expressionism and recent digital technology. In Untitled (Purple Green), her still life seems to have exploded into a deconstructed bloom of colors and brushstrokes. In her two Untitled paintings from 2017, the artist has pioneered a technique of painting on digital prints in such a way that is difficult to tell where the historical reproduction ends and her own painting begins. These still lifes appear to be “glitched,” like a digital image which has been altered or not yet completely loaded. As viewers, we are drawn to these moments of disruption. Through her calculated “errors” Calvert inspires us to question the reliability of images. How much can we trust pictures created today, in the age of rampant photographic manipulation? Are images from previous epochs any more reliable?

Nhat Tran creates artworks knowing they will change over time, like living objects. An expert in the technique of urushi lacquer, Tran explains that urushi comes from tree sap, which is an organic material that naturally evolves and changes color. Urushi is an intensely laborious process that requires patience. Tran applies many thin layers onto the artwork’s surface and then invests hours into sanding layers away, trusting her intuition as to where and how the colors will reappear. INCLINATION TO BELIEVE is one of her earliest urushi sculptures. In this work, Tran experimented with applying coats onto Styrofoam, creating a hard, iridescent shell on a deceptively light material. In THE CYCLE OF UPS AND DOWNS Tran celebrates the imperfections found in nature. Her organic forms are created using particle wood paste. Tran describes the center of EXHALING THE FRAGRANCE as containing a champagne glass (as seen from above). Like a bouquet of flowers or the bouquet of wine, her artwork embraces the richness and transience of life.

-Miranda Lash, 2017

Vian Sora, [Landscape with a Moth], 2017, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

Nhat Tran, EXHALING THE FRAGRANCE, 2016, Urushi Japanese natural lacquer on wood, 24 x 30 x 4.3 inches

Artist Biographies

Tiffany Calvert (Born in 1976 in Hanover, New Hampshire, lives in Louisville, Kentucky)

Tiffany Calvert’s work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions including Lawrimore Project in Seattle, Visual Arts Gallery at SVA New York, and Carl & Sloan Contemporary in Portland, OR. She has been a recipient of a Geraldine R. Dodge Fellowship and residencies at the ArtOmi International Arts Center (NY) and Djerassi Resident Artists Program (CA). In 2010, she was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Her work will be featured in a solo exhibition at Arkansas State University this fall. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Louisville.

Vian Sora (Born in 1976 in Baghdad, Iraq, lives in Louisville, Kentucky)

In the artist’s own words: “I am a self-taught painter that never let go of the brush that I was given as a child. I am expressive, constantly experimenting with color and techniques, influenced by the intensity of my home country, a student of the civilizations lost - Mesopotamia, Assyria and Babylon.

I seek to address results of living conditions and political metaphors derived from living under a dictatorial regime, its chaos, devastation and ultimate destruction. The primary condition of life that is conveyed in my works is that of beauty and homage to the survival of antiquities, lest they are at risk. To be true to my experience, I must paint the horrors of Iraq. I utilize colors and techniques that will purposefully alter over decades of time, mirroring the remnants of ancient history and cities devastated by war. Though within this decay, I aim to preserve beauty.”

Nhat Tran (Born in 1962 in Saigon, Vietnam, lives in Indianapolis, Indiana)

Nhat Tran’s works are in numerous museum collections including the Hubei Museum of Art in Wuhan, China, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, and the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her large urushi lacquer mural, On the Tip of Our Wings, was commissioned by the Indianapolis Airport Authority in 2008 and is on view at the Indianapolis International Airport. Some of her recent exhibitions include Biennial 29, South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, IN (2017), Art Expo New York (2017), Red Dot Miami (2016), and World of Lacquer: Cycle of Time, the 2016 Hubei International Triennial of Lacquer Art in China.

Tran has been a Guest Researcher in Urushi lacquer at the Kyoto City University of the Arts, Kyoto, Japan in 2015 and at the Tokyo University of the Arts in Japan in 2010.

Curator Biography

Miranda Lash (Born in 1981 in San Francisco, California, lives in Louisville, Kentucky)

Miranda Lash is the curator of contemporary art at the Speed Art Museum. Her exhibition at the Speed, Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, co-organized with Trevor Schoonmaker, Chief Curator at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, is an expansive inquiry into Southern identity featuring the work of sixty artists. She also curated Southern Elegy: Photography from the Stephen Reily Collection, a display of nationally renowned photographers exploring landscape, memory, and loss in the South. Both exhibitions are on view through October 14, 2017.

Lash is a member of the Artistic Director’s Council for Prospect.4, the fourth iteration of the international triennial art exhibition Prospect New Orleans, which opens in November 2017. Prior to the Speed, Lash was the founding curator of modern and contemporary art at the New Orleans Museum of Art from 2008 to 2014.

Zephyr Gallery Artist Partners

Artist Board

Patrick Donley Ken Hayden Peggy Sue Howard Chris Radtke

Matt Meers Robert Mitchell Joel Pinkerton Reba Rye

PROJECT 19: The Prolonged Gaze

Miranda Lash Jessica Oberdick Robert Mitchell Chris Radtke Peggy Sue Howard Patrick Donley

Curator Project Manager Graphic Design Exhibition Co-Coordinator Exhibition Co-Coordinator Exhibition Preparator

Image Credit

Cover Image: Tiffany Calvert : Untitled #287, 2017 Oil on digital print on canvas, 48 x 60 inches

The mission of Zephyr Gallery is to serve as a platform to incubate, advocate, and facilitate innovative ideas in art and artistic practices in the region. In 2014, Zephyr launched an ongoing Project series with curated proposal-based exhibitions as well as collaborations with universities, colleges, and cultural institutions.

Project 19: The Prolonged Gaze is the nineteenth exhibition in this series.

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G A L L E R Y 610 East Market Street | Louisville, KY 40202 www.zephyrgallery.org | Thursday–Saturday, 11–6