Pattern Pulp

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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Our artists examine the art of disguise in this week’s gallery picks.

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1. Inspired by the medieval trial of Joan of Arc, the treason of anti-Nazi activist Sophie Scholl, and the contemporary punk prayer of Pussy Riot, Maureen Selwood’s Sounding the Note of A grapples with the uncompromising feminine. Selwood extols the power of sensuality and thought to transcend violence at Rosamund Felsen Gallery
2. Edgar “Saner” Flores’ Fragments of the Soul explores what we have left behind in life and exposes the small, secret parts to our souls at Philly Magic Gardens
3. While the new body of work in Mona/Marcel/Marge draws a clear line to Martha Wilson’s work from the 70’s through today, her work and attitude has evolved from what Wilson describes as “the concerns of a young woman to the concerns of an old lady,” and sees her turning an eye to the way in which the public gaze projects social values onto women as they grow older at P.P.O.W
4. Disguise features works by twelve contemporary artists from Africa and of African descent who explore the impulse of disguise with optical illusions, street actions, computer magic, and virtual reality. Together these works will engage visitors’ imaginations as they consider the art of masking as a transformative process – one that is informed by a multiplicity of influences, from historical African masquerade traditions to contemporary global culture and digital media at Fowler Museum
5. Erik Olsen’s Düsseldorfer portraits of his classmates in Peter Doig’s class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf at Bravin Lee
6. Through the Yoon Ji Seon’s violent destruction and radical reconstruction of her image,Rag Face confronts controversial issues such as the status of women in Korean culture and the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery among its youth. In response to a society of growing sameness and emphasis on idealized beauty, Yoon actively takes command of her self-image, presenting herself as both powerful yet silent, concealed yet exaggerated, beautiful yet grotesqueat Yossi Milo Gallery.

 

October 27, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Color & Graphics: Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch




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What makes a good editorial illustration? Like a book cover, I believe it’s one that immediately draws you in, conveys a complicated message, and feels simple in execution. Achieving this balance is a tough task, as there’s a true art form to showing and not necessarily telling. Editors, art directors and graphic designers grapple with this visual see-saw every day.

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If you read the New York Times, Bloomberg Business Week, The New Yorker or The Washington Post, you may be familiar w the bold clever illustrations of Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch.

Maxwell’s designs incorporate pattern through simple line and texture, often supporting a singular theme and color way within his layout. His work translates complicated topics, allowing the article and accompanying content to shine – which is no easy feat. Click here to page through his portfolio – as you scroll through, you’ll appreciate the edited minimalism that allows his work resonate so clearly.

 

October 26, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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The art and artists that came before them are paramount to the resulting vibrant works in this week’s gallery picks.

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1. Rebecca Kane’s work is a symphony of vibrant color and texture that explores ethereality of light and its balance with the structure of canvas. The work invites the viewers into a fantasy of prismatic color where walls are transformed into melting landscapes of the figments of imagination at Dacia Gallery
2. The high velocity color and fractured narratives explored in Danny Rolph’s recent paintings show an uncompromising commitment to explore the compositional potential on all the canvases and triplewall plastic that he works upon at 532 Gallery
3. Through the layering of abstract forms and her renowned use of color, Beatriz Milhazes creates compositions which are evocative of a multi-part musical score, where the sounds of each different instrument collide and coalesce with one another into a single harmonious whole.  at James Cohan
4. Rachel Rossin introduces her virtual reality experience alongside the oil paintings they inspire and are inspired by. Upheaving traditional notions of portraiture, landscape and still life, the paintings both inform and reflect the technological installation, an inversion of the most sacred of standards— age-old techniques with the flare of advance guard contemporaneity at Zieher Smith & Horton
5. Tomory Dodge has a long running interest in the notion of the elemental; that some deeper reality lies below the surface of things. The paintings in this show all began with some sort of geometry: a random masonry of colored shapes, or a regular grid. These patterns would then be obscured with layers of painting and scraping, revealing and concealing the matrix beneath until a kind of “phantom figuration” emerges, familiar but un-nameable at Acme Los Angeles
6. Emily Noelle Lambert makes intuitive, vibrant paintings and sculptures that draw from diverse art historical movements, cultures, and styles. The title of the exhibition, Idée Fixe, is a synonym for “fetish,” an object imbued with special power. It is a French phrase defined as a desire, obsession or fixation of the mind, and is a starting point for how Lambert considers this new body of work at Denny Gallery

October 20, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s artists experiment with materials + medium to explore and express their message.

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1. Crystal Wagner’s work in Biotica combines 2D and 3D forms while investigating alternative uses of materials through hybrid approaches to printmaking, sculpture, and installation. Her work consists of smaller shadowbox-like sculptures and large scale paper installation that fill the gallery space at 108 Contemporary
2. Jane Rosen’s new exhibition of stone, glass, and bronze works, Cash-Morandi, is a play of presences—a balance between nature and culture, or what Rosen calls “landscape time and domestic time.” In her works, birds of prey and vessels formed of opaque glass perch on hewn stone piers, their surfaces and edges as worn as beach glass at Sears-Peyton Gallery
3. While utilizing the plethora of techniques and materials, Ruth Hardinger and Kara Rooney choose to express their ideas through the exploration of three dimensional, or sculptural idioms, with drawing, photography, digital collage or stone wool being an integral part of the work. There is an open ended dialogue of technologies and materials enacted, of past and present experience; there are traces of the multiple processes and substances used to create individual pieces at Five Myles
4. These new Ingres-inspired paintings are an evolution of Taner Ceylan’s Unfinished Painting series, which also examine historical Orientalist portraits through a contemporary, Eastern lens. The portraits involved an in-depth study of Ingres’ technique and process, as well as a detailed, in-person analysis of the original painting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York at Paul Kasmin Gallery
5. Jared Madere primarily creates installation-based works featuring disparate materials such as salt, flowers, foodstuffs, and plastic tarps that are assembled and aggregated in a manner that insists on their material connections to society, economics, industry, and human emotion. For Madere, the meanings and associations of objects are never stripped away— floral arrangements can point to longing or sadness and a burnt coat is imbued with isolation and dejection at Whitney Museum of American Art
6. Kim Simonsson uses traditional techniques to create sensitive and surreal painted ceramic sculptures. His sculptures combine innocent animal and child forms with a twist of violence and suspense to create a monumental physical presence at Jason Jacques Inc.

October 13, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s gallery picks are all about location and destination.

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1. Peak Salvation is a group show featuring Bay Area artists working in the theme of nature and conservation at Art Thou Gallery
2. Laine Justice interprets scenes from the mythological Battle of Mara, where and when Mara futilely attempts to derail Siddhartha from his momentous path towards enlightenment at Fouladi Projects
3. Evan Hecox’s new work in Terrain at andeken
4. Parodying the American tradition of stay-at-home vacations and the consumerist promises of an escape from the mundane, the nine-member group Okay Moutain has created a series photographic works, an installation, and a sound collage for the exhibition at Mark Moore Gallery
5. Mustafa Hulusi uses photography, painting and video to, in the words of critic and art historian Sir Norman Rosenthal, “depict, obliquely sometimes, the story of Cyprus as a location for the cultural engagements, not always happy, that this island has lived through over the millennia” at Meliksetian | Briggs
6. For Matthew Brandt’s Pictures from Wai’anae:”For the past three years I have been taking photographs in Oahu. These printed photographs were rolled in dirt, leaves, burlap and lace and buried on a family farm in the town of Wai’anae. Over time, the elements of the Hawaiian earth changed these pictures. Presented in this exhibition are remains of this process” at M+B

October 7, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s gallery picks explore moments in time and suspended relationships.

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1. Brendan Monroe’s Morphology investigates dreamlike, intimate, and imagined worlds that evoke the tension between reality and surreality at Boiler Room SF
2. Soey Milk explores a lavish world of colorful textiles and beguiling figures, consisting of works ranging from oil paintings on panel to exquisitely rendered graphite drawings on paper. Milk’s attention to detail, color and organic form brings forth a curious state of mind that is both unexplainable and intimate at Hashimoto Contemporary
3. In Mel Kadel’s Sky’s Eyes, her subjects appear to be filled with a quiet purpose set amid a landscape of patterns and evanescent colors at Slow Culture
4. Presenting one hundred years of portrait photography in West Africa through nearly eighty photographs taken between the 1870s and the 1970s. The installation seeks to expand our understanding of West African portrait photography by rendering the broad variety of these practices and aesthetics at Metropolitan Museum of Art
5. Distinct in her use of bold color and free flowing texture, Hueman compares and contrasts conflicting ideologies to create masterful works that are at once balanced and unsettling. Her latest work featured in this exhibition is a look into a singular moment in time, spliced, dissected, and manipulated through intersecting lines and planes; juxtaposing images that are simultaneously beautiful and grotesque, abstract and figurative, geometric and organic at Mirus Gallery
6. In From Cali With Love surf, skate, punk, but also urban art, psychedelia and underground comics are only a few of the cultural matrices of the California Dreaming that re-emerge from the works of Jeremy Fish, Russ Pope and Zio Ziegler, where daily life is mixed with imagination, in the pursuit of an immediate and narrative art, able to overcome the disciplinary boundaries of contemporary art at Colombo Arte

September 29, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

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