Miami Highlights: Basel and Aqua byNew American PaintingsEleanor Harwood Artists highlighted byNew American Paintings Blog:
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Tuesday, December 11, 2012
MIAMI HIGHLIGHTS: BASEL AND AQUA
Monday, December 3, 2012
AQUA ART FAIR IN MIAMI
I will be participating at the Aqua Art Fair in Miami through Eleanor Harwood Gallery. She'll be in the
largest booth on the second floor to the back of the hotel, Room 214.
Come and visit us.
She has made a catalog of work presented in the fair. Be in touch for inquiries and higher resolution images if you are not able to attend.
She has made a catalog of work presented in the fair. Be in touch for inquiries and higher resolution images if you are not able to attend.
Aqua Art Miami 2012: Dec. 5th - December 9th
Aqua 2012 Exhibiting Artists:
James Chronister, Mel Davis, Niall McClelland, Francesca Pastine, Laura Paulini, Jill Sylvia, Paul Wackers
Location:
1530 Collins Avenue (south of Lincoln Road) Miami Beach FL 33139
Schedule:
Friday, December 7, 11am - 9pm
Saturday, December 8, 11am - 9pm
Sunday, December 9, 11am - 4pm
For inquiries, e-mail eleanor@eleanorharwood.com, or call 415-867-7770
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Aqua 2012 Exhibiting Artists
| James Chronister |
James Chronister
As a group of work, Chronister's paintings work together with the loose over arching theme of appropriating mass images and channeling them through a hand made process; a human maker. The process includes starting with mechanically produced images and filtering them through the eye, hand and brain of the painter. Chronister likes to think of the paintings responding to one
another the way songs on an album might. Even if the paintings (songs) may appear dissimilar upon first strike, he strives for a unifying mood, approach and overall sensibility. Together, the paintings work with one another to create a more complex meaning. The disparate subjects stir deeper questions about their connection.
His use of color is also meticulously thought through with layers and layers of color creating the background "grey" in his paintings. When the paintings are seen as a group the backgrounds turn into a subtle color field series with the images in black carefully dotted on top of the various colored grounds.
James Chronister is based in San Francisco. He grew up in Montana graduating from University of Montana with a BFA. He then moved to San Francisco where he earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2004. He received a SECA nomination from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and his work is in the collection of the Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, CA and in numerous private collections on both the East and West Coasts. He is the winner of the Richard K. Price Scholarship and the Lux Art Institute Residency award.
| Mel Davis |
Mel Davis
Davis had been working in color fields up until 2009 and the shift in her painting practice was prompted by a desire to apply new discoveries in her work.
Previously her monochromatic paintings achieved a singular tone; one that was concerned with wonder. With these new works, Davis strikes a multiplicity of
attitudes: fast, tender, sweeping and bold. Her approach looks effortless and is evidence of an artist in the studio experimenting and enjoying the pleasure of paint and the actual act of painting.
The pieces feel fresh and modern and quick. In actual fact Davis' painting are often worked on and amended numerous times in the months they are in the studio with constant refinement and small alterations slowly adding to the finished pieces.
Of her work she points to the poet Galway Kinnell discussing Walt Whitman's tendencies toward revision in his late poems. Kinnell states that Whitman loses the courage he had from when he was younger. That Whitman would take out the 5 lines that revealed an "inner experience", edited out the "things that are embarrassing to the self", concerned now in becoming the poet for the masses. Kinnell strives in his own poetry to put those 5 lines in. Leaving those 5 lines in is the task Davis sets for herself. Mel Davis is a Berkeley, California based visual artist. She grew up in Montréal, graduated from Concordia University in 1998, then moved to the Bay Area to complete her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. She is part of numerous private and public collections, some of which are Hyatt, Capitol Group and Wellington Management and she is the winner of The Canada Council For The Arts Grant and the Irene Pijoan Memorial award for Painting.
Francesca Pastine
Pastine is excited by the potential of material and its transformation through the process of handwork. Her work speaks to the physical act of the hand creating, not in the sense of 'gesture', but through intimate care and attentiveness to detail.
Pastine began using ARTFORUM magazines as a medium for her work in 2008. She considers her repurposed ARTFORUM magazines as unsolicited collaborations with the artist featured on their cover. The reconfigured magazines map out a tangle of associations, unique contradictions, and paradoxes that combine to imbue the inanimate object with emotional power.
Maintaining a strong connection to the physicality of drawing, her X-acto blade mimics a pencil, subtracting rather than adding. She eschews glue or other manipulations that change the inherent character of the magazines. In this way, they retain their association to what they are, carriers of information that have been handled, earmarked and scuffed over time.
Her newest body of work uses the same techniques but applied to mutual fund pages from the New York Times newspaper. With these she has created masks that have been cut and metal-leafed, dramatically transformed from their original shape. The forms suggest archeological curiosities from tribal sources, toying with our notions of antiquity and present-day meaning.
Francesca Pastine was born in New York City. She earned her BFA in 1993 and MFA in 1996 from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the winner of Kala Fellowship award and the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant, and has work in numerous private collections and the Kala Institute's Print Collection.
See available work by Francesca Pastine
Laura Paulini
Laura Paulini's paintings and drawings are created over long stretches of time, each stripe and each dot meticulously rendered by hand in multiple layers of
paint on panel or ink on paper. Due to the juxtaposition of minute changes in hue and value, the picture planes appear to vibrate. Waverings, absences, and misalignments in the mark-making contribute to an optical effect, while the simple, iconic, and symmetrical compositions retain a sense of stillness.
Exploring the tension between harmony and chaos, growth and decay, Paulini's work evokes imagery as varied as woven textiles, Braille lettering, and pixilated
graphics. Reviewers have consistently responded to this duality, most recently among them Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle who summed up Paulini's recent solo show, SHIMMER, at Eleanor Harwood Gallery this way: "In her painstaking
work, this East Bay painter goes hand to hand with the challenge posed by digital imaging to viewers remaining sensitive to the human touch."
Paulini grew up in Wisconsin receiving a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Milwaukee, WI. She received her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA in 2005. She has shown extensively throughout the USA. Her work is included in prestigious private collections and the Juniper Networks Corporate Collection. She is a winner of the Jay DeFeo Prize, an SFMOMA SECA award nominee and a Kala Art Institute Artist-in-Residence Fellowship awardee.
Jill Sylvia
Jill Sylvia's work is made
out of ledger sheets. These papers are traditionally used to record the
financial transactions of a business or an individual, hosting the data
necessary for accounting information to be compiled, and for analysis in
determining profit and loss. They are the material of economics.
In an attempt to understand
our need to quantify transactions, Sylvia employs this paper. She uses a
drafting knife to individually remove tens of thousands of boxes from
this paper, leaving behind the lattice of the grid intended to
separate the boxes. She involves herself in this routine of trying to
make time and labor palpable while communicating its loss.The skeletal
pages drape and accumulate, demarcate the time cost for their creation,
and become the buildings for which they have laid the groundwork. In her
other work, her "Reconstructions", grids are produced using the
excised bits of paper in order to create a new sense, a new value. The
boxes become the units of the picture plane, the medium of color fields.
With each piece, the notion of "value" is called into question - be it
the value of our quotidian pursuits, the relative value of labor, or the
implicit values of economic advancement.
Jill Sylvia grew up in
Massachusetts. She received a BA from Bard College in New York in 2001
and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. Her work is in
the de Young Museum's permanent collection, San Francisco, California,
The Anderson Collection, San Francisco Bay Area, California, The Frankel
Foundation for Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, The Fidelity
Corporate Collection, Boston, Massachusetts and numerous other private
collections.
See available work by Jill Sylvia
Paul Wackers paints landscapes and still-lifes that are both familiar and alien. His paintings reinterpret and reorganize mundane reality into rich juxtapositions
of colors, objects, shapes, patterns, and structures. In Wackers' view, the works
"offer a glimpse into the way the world is constantly being reloaded with opportunities
and options for reinterpretations and impressions." His earlier work, although pattern rich, featured perhaps more recognizable elements and structures, while his current series of "still lives" are mashed-together amalgamations or arrangements of partially recognizable objects on shelves.
Wackers has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. He is the recipient of a SFMOMA SECA award nomination and a grant winner from the San Francisco Art Institute and the winner of the prestigious Tournesol award at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Wackers received his BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design in 2001 and his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. He is included in numerous private collection around the world. He lives and works in New York.
See available work by Paul Wackers
Niall McClelland
For
Niall McClelland working in black and grey scale allows the viewer to
connect more easily with his process. This transparency about the
process, a system of mark making through folding and xeroxing, fosters
an immediate connection between seeing and understanding, and evokes a
kind of "back to basics" mentality about art making. Stripped of
embellishment, the simplicity and starkness of the work point to the
truth behind any art piece - the hand of its maker.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Review of Unsolicited in the Philadelphia Inquirer
Not that Artforum magazine ever needed help with its design, but Francesca Pastine, a San Francisco artist who is having her first solo exhibition here, has made it even more visually absorbing by cutting shapes into issues of the famously thick and square glossy with an X-acto blade - an act she considers a kind of unsolicited collaboration with the magazine and the cover artists (Bridget Riley, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, and others). Pastine cuts at an angle, leaving the edges of pages, and any number of fleeting art-world trends, temptingly exposed.
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| Francesca Pastine, Artforum 45, Pour Series, 2012 |
Saturday, November 17, 2012
REVIEW OF UNSOLICITED AT PENTIMENTI GALLERY
Here is another review in City Paper of my show Unsolicited:
Re-View
We check out the opulent “This is Elsewhere” at Pentimenti Gallery.
...[w]hile not exactly landscape, Tileston’s work undeniably
has a spatial, topographic element, and Christine Pfister, who runs
Pentimenti, has cleverly paired it with a sister show — “Unsolicited,”
Francesca Pastine’s X-Acto dissections of contemporary-art periodical Artforum.
Artforum, if you’re not familiar, is kind of like the art-world Vogue,
in that its editorial pages of writing and photo spreads are at least
matched in number by tons of gorgeous, luxe-y advertisements in
brilliant colors. Pastine’s “excavations” take advantage of the
magazine’s square format and high-production-value colors: She fans out
pages beyond the glossy’s border and razors away some colored layers of
pages to reveal others underneath. The thick, cut-paper layers, stacked
into topographic masses, are a clear complement to Tileston’s
paintings.
Pastine’s cutaways interact with the
magazines’ cover images, which the artist considers a “unsolicited
collaboration” between herself, the magazine and the artist featured on
the cover. Unlike the found-book interventions of Ishmael Randall Weeks,
these works don’t feel like a meditation on geography, architecture,
colonization or political space. Rather, Pastine’s altered magazines
feel like a fun diorama/valentine to the art world — an externally
localized topographic fun-fair that pairs well with Tileston’s
introverted universes.
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
PHILADELPHIA CITY PAPER REVIEW OF MY EXHIBIT
First Friday focus
City Paper's First Friday Hitlist
PENTIMENTI
Francesca Pastine destroys icons beautifully.
Since 2008, she’s been slicing and dicing her friends’ ARTFORUM magazines with an X-Acto knife.
“I was intrigued by their square format,
particularly when the bloated art market was reflected in their one-inch
thickness,” she says in an artist’s statement. “Starting with the
covers, I cut, bend, manipulate, pull and dig my way through them,
revealing a visceral topography of art trends.”
Her exhibit “Unsolicited” features seven ARTFORUM dissections, made of screws, wood and Plexiglas.
Like any good provocateur, Pastine seems
to respect her subject even as she pokes fun at it. She even talks about
her artwork like it’s a partnership of sorts — an “unsolicited
collaboration with the magazine and the cover artist.” Through Dec. 15, opening Fri., Nov. 2, 6 p.m., 145 N. Second St., 215-625-9990, pentimenti.com.
Monday, November 12, 2012
REBOUND - HALSEY INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Rebound
Dissections and Excavations in Book Art
EXHIBITING ARTISTS
May 23 – July 6, 2013
Rebound: Dissections and Excavations in Book Art brings
together the work of five mixed media artists from around the world who
sculpt, scrape, bend and carve to create astonishing compositions using
books as a point of departure. Curated by Karen Ann Myers, Assistant
Director of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, this exhibition
features works by Brian Dettmer (Atlanta), Long-Bin Chen (Taiwanese, now
living in New York), Guy Laramee (Montreal), Francesa Pastine (San
Francisco), and Doug Beube (New York). Each of these artists transforms
various types of literature and/or printed “books” through sculptural
intervention. Despite the individualistic and exclusive perspective of
each artist, they have remarkable connections in the themes and ideas
they respectively mourn and celebrate.For generations, our society has been lamenting the loss of natural beauty and the earth’s resources to the rising tide of industrial and technological “progress” towards greater efficiency and luxury. With this progression of technology, the relevance of physical books in our culture is diminishing. The tangible, permanent information presented in books is quickly being replaced with digital media and the Internet, which exemplify fluidity and constant change. Books as a vessel for accessible and easily communicated knowledge have become somewhat antiquated. In our ever-evolving digital present, we see a variety of once cherished technologies losing their importance and luster at an increasingly rapid rate.
From the confusion and sense of loss that emerge out of this condition, these artists have created their own responses. Some, like Laramee and Chen, directly address the parallel between the disappearance of natural spaces and books as an outdated mode of expression; carving landscapes from the pages and bindings. Deep crevasses, hidden caves, and awe-inspiring phenomena and landscapes emerge from chiseled pages. Alternately, some artists, like Pastine and Dettmer, seek to bring the books into the future, by digitizing or technologizing them. Here, images are created that are reminiscent of topographical or weather maps, readings from seismographs, or cross-sections of the “bodies” of the books. These works are treated as surgeries or dissections, as scalpels and needles are used to carve away the books’ exteriors.
Brian Dettmer’s precise excavation of books page by page focuses on taking something that already exists and exposing alternate histories and memories, which reveal new relationships. Long-Bin Chen combines the cultures of the East and West through the mixture of sculpture and literature. Through this, we are prompted to examine the eternal vexation of communication and the social relationship we have with books. Guy Laramee’s work plays heavily on the idea of erosion in that knowledge could very well be an erosive process rather than an accumulation. In that light, he brings up the human fascination with the content of consciousness. In turn, he examines not “what” we think about, but “that” we think. Through the glossy publication Art Forum, Francesca Pastine reveals the visceral topography of art trends through an unsolicited collaboration with the magazine and the cover artist. Doug Beube explores the book itself, a seemingly antiquated technology that is still purposeful in a digital age. He accepts its limited capacity as its personality flaw, but moreover its elegance.
In the face of unsettling changes, these artists appeal to a sense of monumentality in their work. The references to nature, religion, science or cultural complexity allude to the idea that only concepts of the greatest importance stand the test of time. Despite the emphasis on the precariousness of human invention, these works do not display a completely bleak outlook on society’s changes. The variety of color, form and openness of composition among the works also celebrate the ingenuity of creating something new from something old. The artworks simultaneously celebrate and forewarn the viewers of the fine line between monuments and ruins.
KNIGHTS ART REVIEW OF UNSOLICITED AT PENTIMENTI GALLERY
Pentimenti Gallery in Old City has double the visual intensity throughout the month of November. On display right now is a two-person show by artists Francesca Pastine and Jackie Tileston that plays with colorful, fluid forms in both abstract painted manifestations and appropriated constructions made from physical art publications themselves.
Francesca Pastine, “Unsolicited Collaboration with Kara Walker, Artforum Excavation Series.”
Francesca Pastine, “Artforum 45.”
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