Monthly Archives: September 2014

Gallery artist Kiel Johnson is currently featured in “ArtWatch 2014: Young Careers – Santa Barbara to Greater LA” at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art (CA). Shown alongside Stephanie Dotson, Julia Haft-Candell, Nathan Huff, Laura Krifka, Chris Rupp, Devon Tsuno, and Liat Yossifur, Johnson’s work will be on view through November 22, 2014 at the museum. Says the museum:

The Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art is launching an ArtWatch series that will focus on different issues and themes that engage contemporary artists living on the West Coast. The first in the series examines eight artists, young in their careers, but fully launched as artists-to-watch.

Admission to the museum is free. Johnson’s upcoming solo exhibition at the gallery, “Walldayallday,” will be on view concurrently with this museum show through November 8, 2014. For information about the artist, or available work, please email info@markmooregallery.com

Whitehot Magazine’s critic Megan Abrahams recently reviewed the gallery’s current solo exhibition by the Clayton Brothers. We congratulate the artists on her positive appraisal of the show!

Says Abrahams:

Playful, poignant, popping with color, bordering on quizzical, this broad and engaging exhibit by the Clayton Brothers explores evocative narrative themes extrapolated from the scene of a thrift shop in Sun Valley, California. This body of work is characterized by a quality of spontaneity, which in part may be attributed to the brothers’ process. Working on the same pieces at different times, they overlap, making it unclear where one brother may have left off and the other picked up. The style of these works also has a sense of immediacy. A preponderance of the pieces are free-form mixed media works on paper, sometimes combining elements of collage and assemblage with drawing and painting. Dynamic, gestural and layered with color as they are, the work manages to capture a sense of the excitement shoppers might feel on discovering treasures among the cast-off items at the store. Contributing to the sense of nostalgia, consistent with the thrift store theme, the works are framed in pastel colors reminiscent of the palette and luster of 1950s-era Fiestaware pottery…

Rob and Christian Clayton may be poking fun at thrift store culture, but in a gentle way, without a hint of malice. Even the darker aspects — the borderline hoarding and obsessive browsing, the economic context that requires purchasing used consumer goods — are conveyed with a sense of benevolence and self-awareness as to their own participation and embrace of the thrifting system. Open to the Public might be seen as a light-hearted homage to the appeal of found object as an art-historical trope, as well as to the quasi-performative thrill of the act of repurposing and recontextualizing a humble, discarded thing.

“Open to the Public” will close today, September 27, 2014. For information about the artists, or available work, please email info@markmooregallery.com

Gallery artist Penelope Umbrico will be featured at the New York Art Book Fair – which takes place September 26-28 at MoMA PS1 – in celebration of her new book, “Out of Order: Used Office Desks and Used Office Plants For Sale.” Produced by RVB Books, the book delves into Umbrico’s interest in the fluid ownership of objects and images, as well as the shifting perception of photography.

The artist will be signing books at the fair tomorrow, September 27th, at table C18 starting at 5pm.

Free and open to the public, the NY Art Book Fair is the world’s premier event for artists’ books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines. This year, the fair features over 350 booksellers, antiquarians, artists, institutions and independent publishers from twenty-eight countries. Last year’s fair was attended by more than 27,000 people.

We congratulate Penelope on the release of this publication, and look forward to hosting her upcoming solo exhibition at the gallery, “Mountains, Moving: Light Leaks, and Chemical Burns” (opening Thursday, October 2, 6-8pm).

For additional information about the artist or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com

Gallery artist David Maisel is the current focus of our Featured Works section of the website. In his new body of work, “The Fall,” Maisel has utilized the topography and geography of Spain as a way to engage in art historical, and sociopolitical narratives.

In Fall of 2013, Maisel was invited to Spain as part of the photographic project Toledo Contemporánea, in which twelve photographers were commissioned to create work about the Spanish city of Toledo as a celebration of the fourth centennial of the painter El Greco. Maisel’s work in his most recent body of work, titled “The Fall” is his response to the areas between the city of Toledo, which was once the cultural epicenter of Europe, and the much larger capital city of Madrid. In The Fall, one feels that the worlds of painting and photography have merged together. The series is based on three different areas of the Spanish landscape:

• Borox –strange, ashen landscapes in a mining and agricultural region of La Mancha. The soil is laden with the mineral borax, which gives a surreal, ashen quality; the landscape shines, almost like a grey sea in a desert.
• Vicalvaro – developments on the periphery of Madrid, where construction was halted after the economic collapse of 2008. The abandoned zones appear like the surreal aftermath of a bombed out city or an alien landing field.
• Fuensalida – croplands in the La Mancha region, gridded, crosshatched, and abstracted.

In addition to referencing the canon of abstraction and photography in this work, Maisel’s new works fit within his longstanding images of radically altered terrain. His hallucinatory worldview encompasses both stark documentary and tragic metaphor, and explores the relationship between nature and humanity today.

Maisel currently has works on view at the University of New Mexico Art Museum (NM) (Maisel will speak on his work on Tuesday, October 21, 5:30 PM at this location), the National Academy of Sciences (DC), and the Musée des Beaux-Artes de Bordeaux (France). For additional information about this artist, or works available, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

The gallery is proud to announce gallery artist Allison Schulnik‘s recent win at the Ottawa International Animation Festival for “Best Experimental/Abstract Animation.” Her film, “Eager” (2014), was shown during the festival (which ran September 17-21) – where it made its Canadian debut at the festival, and was shown alongside several other prestigious animated short film nominees.

We congratulate Allison on this incredible milestone! For available works or information about the artist, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

The gallery congratulates program artist Tim Bavington on joining the College of Fine Art’s faculty team at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. An alumnus of the school’s MA program, Bavington was also a 2014 inductee to the university’s Nevada Entertainer/Artist Hall of Fame.

UNLV is a doctoral-degree-granting institution of more than 27,000 students and 2,900 faculty and staff. Founded in 1957, the university offers more than 220 undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degree programs. UNLV is located on a 332-acre campus in dynamic Southern Nevada and is classified in the category of Research Universities (high research activity) by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The department of art in the College of Fine Arts offers the BA in art, the BFA in art, the BA in art history, and the MFA in art. The BA and BFA programs are available with concentrations in painting, drawing & printmaking, photography, graphic design, and sculpture. Bavington will focus largely on Color Theory, in addition to several other areas of concentration.

Music is the genesis of Bavington’s paintings. He is best known for translating music to canvas by assigning sounds to corresponding colors and compositions. His paintings are reminiscent of Op Art from the 1960s, yet possess the synthetic, digital glow of modern times. In his paintings, Bavington aligns the 12 notes of a musical scale with 12 tones of color from the color wheel. Using synthetic polymer paint, he translates audio — guitar music from The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Oasis — into vertical stripes of color that directly correspond to each note. Although his process adheres to a regimen, his paintings remain improvisational and rely on the decisions of his artistic presence. In addition to paintings, Bavington has explored large-scale sculptures, including an installation of musical energy translated to vertical bands of colored steel for The Smith Center for the Performing Arts (Las Vegas, NV). He also was awarded a General Services Adminstration Art in Architecture Award for his large-scale installation in the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building in Portland (OR).

Bavington’s work is included in the public collections of Fredrick R. Weisman Collection (Calif.), Honolulu Art Museum, Albright-Knox Art Gallery (N.Y.), Creative Artists Agency (Calif.), Joslyn Art Museum (Neb.), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (Calif.), Portland Art Museum (Ore.), United Talent Agency (Calif.), Vivendi Universal (Calif.), Palm Springs Art Museum (Calif.), Denver Art Museum (Colo.), The Museum of Modern Art (N.Y.), and Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University. He has exhibited at LeeAhn Gallery (Daegu), Jack Shainman Gallery (N.Y.), Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard (Paris), Space Gallery (London), Museum of Fine Arts (Mass.), Laguna Art Museum (Calif.), and the Texas Fine Arts Center among others.

For information about the artist, or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

We congratulate Tim on this major accomplishment!

The Clayton Brothers‘ current exhibition, “Open to the Public,” was recently selected by Artsy Editorial as a Fall 2014 Exhibitions highlight. Alongside exhibitions at Gagosian, L.A. Louver, and David Zwirner, “Open to the Public” was chosen as one of the publication’s premiere national shows. It has also been the subject of much critical acclaim – including reviews from Juxtapoz, Artsy Editorial, Hi-Fructose, and LA Weekly. It was also selected as a “Datebook” pick by LA Times critic, Carolina Miranda.

The brothers’ exhibition was also the subject of a substantial artist profile by art critic Hugh Hart for Fast Company, as well as a glowing review by Huffington Post arts writer, Annabel Osberg.

The show remains on view through September 27, 2014. For information about available works or the artists, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

Gallery artist Shaun Gladwell will be featured in DLECTRICITY, a city-wide festival in Detroit (MI) taking place September 26-27, 2014.

DLECTRICITY – presented by DTE Energy – is Detroit’s nighttime festival of art + light that features over 35 world-renowned and emerging artists whose cutting-edge works of art will illuminate Midtown Detroit, from the Detroit Institute of Arts down to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. This two-night “Nuit Blanche” festival is scheduled for Friday, September 26 and Saturday, September 27 in Midtown Detroit from 7:00 p.m. to midnight. Saturday night also features the DLECTRICITY Light Bike Parade where thousands of cyclists will bike a 4-mile route through Midtown Detroit, adding extra light and energy to the streets. Weekend programming also includes artist talks and performances. DLECTRICITY is produced by Midtown Detroit, Inc. and is free to the public.

Gladwell will present his 2012 video, Broken Dance (Beatboxed). This project will run concurrently with the artist’s inclusion in Moving Image: Istanbul, which takes place September 25-28, 2014. For information about available works by Shaun Gladwell, or additional background on the artist, please email info@markmooregallery.com

The gallery is pleased to announce the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston‘s formal acquisition of Kim Rugg‘s “America” (2013) for its permanent collection.

In her maps, Rugg re-envisions the topography of various states, countries, continents, and even the world without borders, featuring a staggeringly precise hand-drawn layout with only city names and regions as reference points. In own sense of abstracted cartography, Rugg redistributes traditional map colors (or eliminates them entirely) in order to nullify the social preeminence given to constructed territories, and highlight the idea that our attention is manipulated to focus on the powerful few instead of the physical many.

Rugg received her MFA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art (London). Her work can be seen in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art (D.C.) and the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (CA), the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), the Norton Museum (FL), and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (TX) among others. She has been included in exhibitions at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (CA), Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NY), Galerie Schmidt Maczollek (Cologne), and Nettie Horn Gallery (Manchester), and was the recipient of the Thames and Hudson Prize from the Royal College of Art Society in 2004. She lives and works in London (UK).

We congratulate Kim on this major milestone! For information about the artist, or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com