Monthly Archives: September 2014

Mark Moore Gallery is proud to announce program artist Shaun Gladwell‘s inclusion in Moving Image: Istanbul, a global art fair devoted exclusively to contemporary video. For the first time, the fair will hold an edition of its critically acclaimed fair model in the Kuleli Building at the Halic Congress Center, September 25-28, 2014, concurrently with the ArtInternational art fair.

The gallery will present Shaun Gladwell’s newest video, “A Study in Stillness and Balance,” (2014), which depicts a figure (the artist) balancing on an off-road mountain bicycle in various locations throughout Campbelltown (AUS). These performances involve the rider remaining as still as possible within urban spaces at night. Only small and subtle movements of the rider are detected. Occasionally, a car will pass through the background of an otherwise still and quiet urban scene, illustrating a brief juxtaposition between the static and active aspects of modern society. The notion of stillness and balance becomes a play on Eastern models of meditation, which often associate exterior, physical stillness and balance with emotional and spiritual equilibrium. Gladwell draws a connection between Eastern philosophy and global sociopolitical well-being via this metaphor, drawing special attention to the paradox of sitting atop an unmoving bicycle. Through his literal, physical immobility, Gladwell embodies the stagnant nature of cultural politics and policy within the Campbelltown region, and modern world at large – an evocative reference to the shortcomings of our political and spiritual progress. This fair presentation will be the global debut of this work to the public.

Shaun Gladwell (b. 1972) is an Australian-born, London-based artist. He completed Associate Research at Goldsmiths College, London in 2001 and has since undertaken numerous international residencies and commissions. He has exhibited prodigiously in Europe, North and South America, and in the Asia Pacific Region. International 2013 exhibition highlights include those at the Royal Academy of Arts (London), “California-Pacific Triennial” at the Orange County Museum of Art (CA), KUAD Gallery (Istanbul), and “Video Forever,” a touring exhibition, featured at Gallery Magda Danysz (Paris), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), and the Museum of Lyon (France). Gladwell’s work is included in the public collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo), Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Progressive Art Collection (PA), SCHUNCK (Heerlen), VideoBrasil (Brazil), Wadsworth Atheneum (CT), among many others. The artist lives and works in the UK.

The Curatorial Advisory Committee for Moving Image Istanbul 2014 includes Paula Alzugaray (Independent curator, São Paulo, Brazil), Sabine Brunckhorst (Collector, Hamburg, Germany), Dan Cameron (Chief Curator, Orange County Museum of Art Newport Beach, California), Kathleen Forde (Artistic Director, Borusan Contemporary Istanbul, New York, NY, and Istanbul, Turkey), Kenichi Kondo (Curator, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan), and Azra Tüzünoglu (Founder and Director, PILOT Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey).

Admission to the fair is free. For special events programming and fair details, please visit the fair’s visitor page. For information about the availability of Shaun Gladwell’s featured work, please contact the gallery, and we will accommodate your needs.

Gallery artist Christopher Russell‘s current exhibition at Elizabeth Leach Gallery (Portland, OR) was recently chosen by the Willamette Week as a Critic’s Pick. Says critic Richard Speer:

How would you photograph the end of the world? Christopher Russell takes up that question in a new series of altered photographs, Dissonance, Coincidence & Errant Gradations of Light. Using a cheap camera lens, he does something we’re told never to do: With his camera as his eye, he looks directly into the sun. The resulting images capture sprays of spookily brilliant overexposure. As if these images weren’t ominous enough already, Russell subsequently subjects them to a battery of physical batterings to further distress the prints. He scratches them with sharp objects, folds them into sections and sometimes hurls them onto the ground and stomps on them. It leads to a sooty, ragged appearance—the way a photograph might look after a nuclear explosion.

Don’t miss this incredible show, on view at the gallery through September 27, 2014. New works by the artist are also our current “Featured Works” for this week. For additional information about these, and other works by the artist, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

Program artist David Maisel will open a solo exhibition at the University of New Mexico Art Museum this Friday, September 12, 2014. Titled “David Maisel/ Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime,” the show will survey four chapters of Maisel’s larger ongoing series titled “Black Maps.” The exhibition was curated by Lisa Tamiris Becker (Director, Center for the Humanities and the Arts) and Helmut Müller-Sievers (Eaton Professor of Humanities, University of Colorado Boulder). Says the university:

Composed of large-scale photographs, this exhibition leads the viewer on a hallucinatory journey through landscapes in the American West that have been transformed through the physical and environmental effects of industrial-scale water diversion projects, open-pit mineral extraction, and urban sprawl. Maisel’s powerful aerial photographs exist as aesthetic and political archives documenting the impact of both human consumption and inhabitation. More than mere records, these photographs evoke sublime beauty and apocalyptic destruction, positioning Maisel at the forefront of a complex new approach to framing and interpreting issues of contemporary landscape and culture. Maisel’s mineral-based, painterly color prints transform poisonous human-altered landscapes into subjects and objects of extreme beauty while simultaneously unveiling the magnitude of hidden ecological devastation that punctuates the vast interior of the American West, a space that is often represented in the visual, cinematic, and literary arts as endless and eternal.

The show will remain on view in the Main Gallery and Clinton Adams Gallery September 13 – December 20, 2014, with an opening reception, Friday, September 12, 6 – 8 pm (preceded by a members’ preview at 5 pm).

In his article for Fast Company, art critic Hugh Hart declares that the Clayton Brothers master “Their specialty: drawing on seemingly mundane sources of inspiration to craft color-blasted paintings charged with manic energy and impish humor.”

Including an extensive interview with the artist duo, the article expounds on the influences and process for the brothers’ current solo exhibition at the gallery. Hart delves into how their collaboration affects their respective art-making practices:

For Open to the Public and other joint projects, the brothers give each other free rein to erase, paint over, or otherwise alter any art piece in progress. To create “This Is Not a Man With a Pipe,” Christian drew the face and Rob later added the pipe. “I did a drawing of the man’s face in the shape of the pinched pot because we’d been admiring the shapes of these clay pots at the store,” Christian recalls. “After we saw some Magritte prints at the store, Rob decided to put a pipe in the man’s mouth and that’s when the piece came full circle.”

Rob elaborates, “At the studio we don’t say, ‘This is mine, that’s yours.’ We refer to the drawings that haven’t made it into the process yet as carcasses. If a painting sits around for a while, one of us will usually grab it all of a sudden and change it in some way. It’s a constant give and take.” Christian adds, “When do get into a heated spot with a piece, we know each other well enough to let things stew. I guess it’s worked out pretty well,” he laughs. “So far we haven’t killed each other.”

We thank Hugh for his insightful article on the Clayton Brothers. “Open to the Public remains on view through September 27, 2014.

Gallery artist Penelope Umbrico has quite the full dance card for Fall 2014. Currently on view through October 5th at the Museum of Modern Art (NY) is “A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio,” which examines the ways in which photographers and other artists using photography have worked and experimented within their studios, from photography’s inception to the present. Opening on September 11 (on view through November 1) is “Web on the Wall,” a group exhibition at Robert Koch Gallery (CA) in San Francisco, which will coincide with “Alterations” at the Florida Atlantic University Galleries, Boca Raton (FL) – another group exhibition that will be on view from September 19, 2014 – March, 2015. Additionally, Umbrico will also have work in the BRIC Arts Media House, Brooklyn Biennial – which will take place from September 19 – December 14, 2014, and the artist will also celebrate her monograph book launch for “Out of Order” with RVB Books (New York) at the New York Art Book Fair on September 26th, 2014.

Following her October 2nd opening at Mark Moore Gallery (which will remain on view through November 8th, 2014), is a group exhibition at XPO Gallery (Paris) that will open on October 9th, as well as the book launch for her new monograph with the Aperture Foundation, titled “Range.” The book launch event and signing will take place at Paris Photo (Paris) on November 14th, as will the opening reception for her solo exhibition and second monograph launch for “Out of Order” (featuring an essay by Clément Chéroux) at RVB Books (Paris).

Finally, to round out her European tour, Umbrico will partake in a group exhibition at Neumeitser Bar-Am (Berlin) titled “Collecting Mode” (which opens November 15th), and also participate in a presentation and panel discussion about “Landscape in Contemporary Photography: From the Sublime to the Ridiculous” at the Tate Modern (London) on November 19th, 2014.

We wish Penelope our most sincere congratulations on all of these projects and accolades, as well as a hearty dose of caffeine to get her through the end of the year.

Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to announce its representation of San Francisco-based photographer, David Maisel.

Maisel’s large-scaled, surreal photographs chronicle the complex relationships between natural systems and human culture. His research-based practice has been the subject of five monographs, including “The Lake Project” (Nazraeli Press, 2004), “Oblivion” (Nazraeli Press, 2006), “Library of Dust” (Chronicle Books, 2008), “History’s Shadow” (Nazraeli Press, 2011), and “Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime” (Steidl, 2013). Maisel’s images of radically altered terrain have transformed the practice of contemporary landscape photography. His hallucinatory worldview encompasses both stark documentary and tragic metaphor, and explores the relationship between nature and humanity today. Maisel’s images of environmentally impacted sites consider the aesthetics and politics of open pit mines, clear-cut forests, rampant urbanization and sprawl, and zones of water reclamation. These surreal and disquieting images take us towards the margins of the unknown, and as the Los Angeles Times has stated, “argue for an expanded definition of beauty, one that bypasses glamour to encompass the damaged, the transmuted, the decomposed.” Maisel also explores similar ideas of perception through alternative techniques in other bodies of work, such as “History’s Shadow” (completed during the artist’s residency at the Getty Research Institute) and “Library of Dust,” which The New York Times has called “a fevered meditation on memory, loss, and the uncanny monuments we sometimes recover about what has gone before.”

Maisel is the recipient of a 2011 grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, a 2008 Artist Residency from the Headlands Center for the Arts, and a 2007 Scholar/Artist Residency from the Getty Research Institute. Maisel has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Opsis Foundation. He was appointed a Trustee of the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2011. His work has been shown globally, including in such prestigious institutions as the California Museum of Photography (CA), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (AZ), Portland Art Museum (OR), Fotografie Forum International (Frankfurt), American Academy (Rome), Musee des Beaux Artes (Bordeaux), and Seoul Arts Center (Seoul) among many other venues. Maisel’s works are in major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), the Getty Museum (CA), the National Gallery of Art (D.C.), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), among many other institutions. He received his BA from Princeton University, studied at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and received his MFA from California College of the Arts. The artist lives and works in Sausalito (CA).

For information about this artist and available works, please feel free to contact the gallery, and we will accommodate your needs. The gallery will feature new works by Maisel at the Miami Project Art Fair, December 2-7, 2014.

As part of the gallery’s new “Featured Works” program, we are pleased to spotlight new paintings by Joshua Dildine. Dildine was recently chosen by ArtBook Guy as one of “100 Super Hot Artists for 2014,” and currently has works on view in “Savage Sentimentality,” a group exhibition at Cerritos College Art Gallery (which remains on view through October 10, 2014).

Merging archival autobiographical photographs with viciously gestural painting, Joshua Dildine confronts the subject of conventional recollection. A fixation shared by society at large, the contemplation of past events and relationships ultimately shapes our psychology moving forward – as a flicker of fond reminiscence, ardent shame, or jovial glee can be activated by a single sensory cue. With a purposeful cognizance, Dildine mines these runes for the underlying traits that forge our shared humanity: the humor found in the compromising, the endearment found in the aggravating, or the conflict found in the absent. His painterly swaths are as visceral as the family photos they conceal, his vivid palette alluding to the glaring absurdity of our incessant self-analysis and contemplation of the past. Through a carefully disjointed lens, Dildine creates experiences that are at once present and bygone, and whimsically harnesses the contemporaneous nature of our being.

Dildine (b. 1984, CA), received his MFA from Claremont Graduate University (CA). He has been featured in group exhibitions in Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Murfreesboro, as well as the Frederick Weisman Museum of Fine Art (CA). He was also the recipient of the 2010 Claremont Graduate University Award. The artist lives and works in Claremont, CA.