Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Ryan Tomcho | TryHarDer


TryHarDer blog has posted some pictures from Ryan Tomcho's opening.
You can see them here.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Pamela Jorden | The Working Title | Group Show NYC


The Working Title
On View from March 25 – April 29

A 32-artist group survey of recent abstraction organized by Progress Report Opening Reception: Friday, March 25, 6-9pm Temporary Gallery Location: 305 E 140th St #1A Bronx, NY 10454 Bronx River Art Center (BRAC) is pleased to present The Working Title, a 32-artist group survey of recent abstraction organized by Progress Report, opening on March 25, 2011. The exhibition, which runs until April 29, 2011, is the third in a series hosted in our temporary location, "On the Block", at 305 E 140 St. #1A, Bronx, NY, while we undergo a seven-million dollar renovation to our West Farms facility.

Artists featured: Amy Feldman, Benjamin King, Britton Tolliver, Cordy Ryman, Dennis Hollingsworth, Douglas Melini, EJ Hauser, Eric Freeman, Gary Petersen, Halsey Hathaway, Ian Pedigo, Inna Babaeva, Ivin Ballen, Jasmine Justice, JD Walsh, Jered Sprecher, Joshua Abelow, Joy Curtis, Keltie Ferris, Kris Chatterson, Lauren Luloff, Letha Wilson, Matthew Deleget, Omar Chacon, Osamu Kobayashi, Pamela Jorden, Patrick Brennan, Stacy Fisher, Tamara Zahaykevich, Tisch Abelow, Vince Contarino, Yadir Quintana

The name of the exhibition refers to the changing classification, description, or title that is given to abstraction. By nature, abstraction resists tradition and categorization transforming itself into a highly visual moving target. These artists employ abstraction as a means to investigate different approaches to materials, systems, media and content. Rather than following a pre-established doctrine of romantic sentimentality, most of the works elicit an air of experimentation, familiarity, and an overall sense of purpose.

The Working Title brings together different perspectives on abstraction in conversation with each other. Minimalism, post-modern, geometric, gestural, formal, color filed, video and process-driven works occupying the same room, creating unpredictable relationships through contrasting approaches.

Having direct access to technology has become an important tool for artists to share and discuss their practice, making connections on a regional and global level. The collective stance and attitudes on making art are less defensive than they used to be, opening up conversations with the past by seeking out and elaborating on previous approaches that may have been marginalized or forgotten.

The Working Title is less about seizing the moment, but more of a selection of current voices that use abstraction as a starting point to create work that expands the trajectory of what is possible.

This exhibition was organized by Progress Report, a visually-driven project that offers a glimpse of the creative process that share various perspectives from the working artist’s point of view.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Henry Taylor | Opening @ Blum and Poe



Blum & Poe is very pleased to present its first solo exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Los Angeles-based artist Henry Taylor.

In Henry Taylor's work, the line between art and life is often indistinguishable: freely commingling intensely personal figurative paintings with totemic assemblage sculpture. Taylor has developed a unique visual dialect wedded to the downtown - Los Angeles community he calls home, addressing his subjects with the ease of an insider and the hand of an outsider. Taylor's nuanced portraits shed a sentimental light on near and dear friends, family members, lovers and heroes, both dead and alive, real and imagined. They are non-hierarchical, generous and democratic likenesses of the people most central to his life and thought, with equal emphasis placed on a portrait of his niece and nephew in relaxed pose or larger than life statuesque representations of Serena Williams or Jackie Robinson. An acute documentarian of his community, Taylor fits squarely into the lineage of painter as social observer, channeling amongst others, Alice Neel, Toulouse Lautrec and John Singer Sargent.

Taylor's paintings and sculptures are often constructed in a frenetic manner with partial gestures, half-phrases or incomplete figures painted on surfaces as varied as cigarette packs, cereal and beer boxes or suitcases. These objects, prior to Taylor's intervention, were left for dead on street corners and in dumpsters, but when salvaged by the artist, become fair game, to be used as integrated components in sculptures or as alternative surfaces to stretched canvas for painting. Most recently Taylor has begun collecting emptied Clorox bleach bottles, which when spray painted black and inverted on broomsticks take the form of African tribal masks or dancing statues. Propped on constructed bases of plywood and held together by whatever means necessary, these figures come to life, defined both by their unique handmade construction and shabby materiality. They exist as accumulations of found objects intimately linked to their surroundings, repurposed and breathed with life by their maker.

Taylor's vernacular is the street. His studio practice is deeply informed by its sights and sounds, and most notably by its people; those who move freely between Taylor's life and studio, often only long enough to have their portrait painted once. These personalities, along with the historical figures who find their way into Taylor's work, are rendered with a dignity and soul, befitting their place within Taylor's world.

Henry Taylor (b. 1958, Oxnard, CA) has been honored with solo museum exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, 2007, the Santa Monica Art Museum, Santa Monica, CA, 2008 and will be included in the forthcoming exhibition, Human Nature: Contemporary art from the Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Taylor has been included in group exhibitions at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL, MOCA North Miami, Miami FL, Peres Projects, Berlin, Jack Hanley Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and Milliken Gallery, Sweden. Henry Taylor received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from California Institute of the Arts and lives and works in downtown Los Angeles.

Blum & Poe | 2727 S La Cienega Blvd. | Los Angeles | CA | 90034

Monday, March 7, 2011

Ryan Tomcho | Linger


Ryan Tomcho | Linger
March 12 - April 9
Opening Reception Saturday, March 12th 7-9pm

Press Release

Ryan Tomcho's lush canvasses approach painting through nontraditional means. Pigment here is encapsulated in resin and applied by a machine. The trace of the hand is taken hostage by imposter brush marks which weren't created in the physical sense. They only exist as artificial imitations applied as a very thin layer of pigment. The surface is treated as if it were a space where events float in, and not as a crust with material density. These events are moments where one edge, illusion, color, structure, and imposter mark interacts with another in a way which activates sensory experience. Space is stretched and manipulated to expand possibilities of a pictorial experience which is not tethered by a unified whole. One could even say they're a space of fantasy. Each, fortunately, can look quite unlike another, though repetition is not necessarily excluded.
Sure, these were produced with a technological apparatus, but that doesn't mean they're limited to a discourse on technology and its modes of production. How it's made is ideally not as important as what it's doing, which is to say the engagement exceeds the means of production.