Monthly Archives: October 2014

Gallery artist Kiel Johnson (whose new solo show is currently on view at the gallery) will produce an open sculpture workshop and visiting artist lecture for the University of Wisconsin this November. Over the course of three days, the artist will collaborate with students on mixed-media works in order to create a fleet of Tall Ships.

Taking place November 11-13th, this project and subsequent lecture is sure to delight and amaze. Similarly, don’t miss “Walldayallday” at Mark Moore Gallery – which remains on view through November 8th, 2014.

The gallery is proud to announce the Norton Museum of Art‘s (FL) acquisition of “Untitled #16” (2006) by Josh Azzarella for its permanent collection.

Since its founding in 1941, The Norton Museum of Art has grown and evolved to become one of Florida’s major cultural institutions. The Museum is internationally known for its distinguished permanent collection featuring American Art, Chinese Art, Contemporary Art, European Art and Photography. Its masterpieces of 19th century and 20th century painting and sculpture include works by Brancusi, Gauguin, Matisse, Miró, Monet, Picasso, Davis, Hassam, Hopper, Manship, O’Keeffe, Pollock and Sheeler.

Josh Azzarella (b. 1978, Ohio) creates videos and photographs that explore the power of context in the authorship of memory, oftentimes utilizing seminal moments in pop culture and news media to create accessible confrontations with historiography. By illuminating the individual encounter with communal experiences, Azzarella evaluates the perception of realness – which can ultimately be rooted in both the fantastic as much as the pragmatic.

Azzarella was the recipient of the 2006 Emerging Artist Award and related solo exhibition from The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT). He has previously shown at the California Museum of Photography (CA), University Art Museum, Long Beach (CA), Vancouver Art Gallery (Canada), Kavi Gupta Gallery (IL), Academie der Kunste (Berlin), Sean Kelly Gallery (NY), Catharine Clark Gallery (CA), Mississippi State University (MS), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (CA) and DCKT Gallery (NY). His work is included in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PA), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (TX), the San Diego Museum of Modern Art (CA), the Margulies Collection (FL), Western Bridge (WA) and JP Morgan Chase (NY). He lives and works in Easton, PA.

We congratulate Josh on this milestone!

Congratulations to Kiel Johnson, whose current exhibition is Artillery Magazine‘s “Pick of the Week!” Says critic Eve Wood:

Damn, Kiel Johnson knows how to draw — not to mention he’s an amateur beekeeper; thus the inspiration for his newest exhibition at Mark Moore where strangely kinetic, hive-like utopias appear to be unraveling, creating a damnable system of ultimate unreliability. Sound familiar, humans? Johnson’s genius is that he celebrates these jettisoned utopias, yet despite the near-perfect beauty inherent in the details, one has the overall sense that their blissful disintegration is of our own making. After all, we can gage our human atrocities against the natural world simply by studying the microcosmic universe of the honey bees, and find, sadly, that we are all too barren. 

Kiel’s show remains on view through November 8, 2014. For more information about the artist or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

Ryan Wallace will open a solo show of new work at Susan Inglett Gallery (NY) tomorrow, October 23, from 6-8pm. Titled “Slo Crostic,” the show will remain on view through December 4, 2014, and focus on new abstract paintings, collage, and sculpture by the artist. Says the gallery:

Wallace’s process of abstraction is based in materiality, working methodically back from the detritus left behind in the studio, the ends become the means. The artist delves into the technical and formal properties of abstract painting by creating reliefs that prize texture, light and surface tension. By limiting his palette Wallace makes the medium the message, the works are chromatically minimalist, and materially maximalist. Through these material choices we are brought directly into the studio, with both paintings and sculptures serving as time capsules of production.

The stacked sculptures combine Carl Andre’s floor pieces and the serial reproduction of Sol Lewitt with an additional expressionist gesture; Minimalism gone rogue. Wallace also cites Bruce Naumann’s “Mapping The Studio” yet in this case the absence of human presence is ultimately the step from subjecthood to objecthood, from choice to chance. These objects serve as surrogate paintings for the artist, incorporating elements that cannot function in two dimensional space. While reading as sculpture the conversation remains about painting through the artist’s use of shared language and material calling our attention to the mark and to the way that information is gathered and displayed in an aesthetic mise-en-scène.

Wallace received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RI). He was the 2011 recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, and has had solo exhibitions in Copenhagen, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. He has also shown work at the Frans Masereel Center (Belgium), Torrance Art Museum (CA), Katzen Arts Center (D.C.), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (CA), and numerous other venues around the world. His work is featured in the public collections of the U.S. Department of the Treasury (D.C.), the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (CA), and the Cleveland Clinic (OH), among others. Wallace is also represented by Cooper Cole Gallery (Toronto), Marianne Friis Gallery (Copenhagen), and Susan Inglett Gallery (New York). The artist lives and works in New York.

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

The gallery congratulates Penelope Umbrico on her recent review in the Los Angeles Times! Written by Sharon Mizota, the article expounds on Umbrico’s distinctive engagement with technology, photography, and nostalgia. Says Mizota:

“The further we move from traditional technologies, it seems, the deeper the pull to revisit them. Penelope Umbrico’s digital prints at Mark Moore were created on a smartphone but look like old-fashioned photographic accidents. Plagued — indeed, overwhelmed — by light leaks, misalignments and color gels gone awry, they are striking evidence of a collective nostalgia for our vanishing analog past.

[Ansel] Adams may be the inspiration, but his particular vision isn’t at issue here. Our image of the mountain is no longer based on light beaming through a ground glass, but on data beaming through a satellite.”

To read the full review, please visit the LA Times website. For information about the artist, or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

The gallery is proud to announce the Blanton Museum‘s acquisition of “Roadside Attractions” (2012) by gallery artist collective, Okay Mountain.

As part of the Diane Marek Visiting Artist Series, “Roadside Attractions” was commissioned for the Cress Gallery of Art at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga. The sculpture, which is as much a print project as it is a sculpture, draws upon the mythology and quirkiness of different categories of roadside attraction, some more or less substantial, some more or less believable, all for the purpose of delighting and confounding the expectations of the browser and would-be tourist. The brochures themselves, all one hundred designed by the members of the collective, mimic the discordant imagery and incongruous information often found in a typical visiting center brochure rack, a place where do-it-yourself and professional design are forced to cohabit. The printed works – like the brochures they are drawn upon – are free to the viewing public, giving “Roadside Attractions” something of a life outside the institutional setting where it originates.

In 2006, Okay Mountain formed their collective and simultaneously opened an exhibition space in East Austin, Texas, by the same name.Their participation on both the production and vending sides of the same industry contributed to a shared heightened awareness about the nature of exchange—a trait that has manifested itself in objects and performances that parody our uniquely American reverence for commerce. Through calculated exaggeration and espousal of the absurd, Okay Mountain creates farcical caricatures of a national identity. Faux infomercials, flyers, guidebooks, and memos are rife with satirical imitations of salesmen, tour guides and mascots – playing on our communal tendency for insatiable want. As consumers, we’re often told that the perfect handyman tool, business plan, or instructional manual can guide you towards your best self; Okay Mountain riffs on these distorted perceptions, and lampoons their fallacies with a shrewd wit. Nonsensical instructions scrawled across a whiteboard mimic the brainstorm sessions of a start-up company, but ultimately lead to inconclusive results. Products born from harebrained invention appear fetishized and enticing, but are fundamentally useless. Okay Mountain identifies the contrivances that shape our relentless desire for immediacy and accumulation, and spoofs them with a sagacious flair.

Formed in 2006 in Austin, Texas, Okay Mountain collective is comprised of artists Sterling Allen, Tim Brown, Peat Duggins, Justin Goldwater, Nathan Green, Ryan Hennessee, Josh Rios, Carlos Rosales-Silva, Michael Sieben, and Corkey Sinks.  While most artists are alumni of the University of Texas at Austin (TX), others are graduates of University of California Los Angeles (CA), Rhode Island School of Design (RI), and the University of Kansas (KS). Institutional exhibitions have included those at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston (TX), Austin Museum of Art (TX), McNay Art Museum (TX), Arthouse (TX), University of Tennessee, Chattanooga (TN), and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (MA). Their work is included in the permanent collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (CT), McNay Museum of Art (TX), Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (CA), Santa Barabara Museum of Art (CA), and Vanderbilt University (TN).

For more information about the artists, or available work, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

The gallery is pleased to announce that its Director, Catlin Moore, has recently been elected Chair of the Southern California chapter of ArtTable. ArtTable is the leading national nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing women’s professional leadership in the visual arts. It serves women at all stages of their careers, with a special effort to increase diversity in the arts professions. ArtTable’s eclectic array of programming is an essential benefit to its membership. This includes special access, panel discussions, networks, and professional development opportunities.

As Southern California’s regional Chair, Moore will lead an Executive Committee of members to develop new programming content, membership outreach, and education about the local arts community. This chapter of the organization includes more than 150 members, whom reside in cities from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

In addition to being the Director of Mark Moore Gallery (Culver City, CA), Moore is the Co-Director of 5790projects (Los Angeles, CA). She received her B.A. from the University of California, Irvine, and her M.A. from California State University, Long Beach. She is also a founding member of the Orange County Museum of Art’s “Contemporaries,” and sits on the Curators’ Lab Committee for the Fellows of Contemporary Art. She has also been a contributing writer for various arts and culture publications, including Beautiful/Decay, DailyServing, ArtLog, .ISM, and the Orange County Register. Prior to her time at Mark Moore Gallery, she worked as the Director of Press and Marketing for the Beall Center for Art + Technology (Irvine, CA) and as a Fair Assistant for PULSE Contemporary Art Fair (New York, Miami). Currently, she also sits on the Culver City Arts District council, and is an active member of many museums in the Los Angeles area.

To read ArtTable’s Member Spotlight on Moore, please click here. We congratulate her on this accomplishment. To learn more about becoming an ArtTable member, please refer to the organization’s membership page.

Gallery artists Allison Schulnik and Feodor Voronov will both have works featured in 68projects’ (Berlin) upcoming exhibition, “Person, Place or Thing: Works on Paper by Over 50 Artists.” Opening on November 15, 2014, the show will remain on view through January 10th, 2015. Says the gallery:

The show reunites a selection of works on paper by emerging and established artists, including works by Brooke Werhane Maples, Gabby Collins-Fernandez, Keith Haring, Zak Prekop, Richard Serra, and Richard Tuttle amongst others. Using a single medium as the basis for the group exhibition allows for a diverse range of artworks and participating artists, tightened by asking each artist to make a work that falls into one of the three categories in a common guessing-game prompt.

68projects is run by Quang Bao, who studied literature and arts management at Boston and Columbia Universities. He has edited and written essays, fiction, nonfiction and reviews for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, National Public Radio and others. His professional experience spans twenty years of work with arts organizations, individual artists and nonprofits. For the last six years, he served as the director of The Rema Hort Mann Foundation  – and organization established through family and friends of New York City-based contemporary art collectors Susan and Michael Hort.

For more information about this exhibition, please contact the gallery.

Tomorrow, October 11th, interdisciplinary artist Cheryl Pope will stage a performance at Gallery 400 (Chicago, IL), a not-for-profit arts exhibition space within the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In conjunction with Universal Declaration of Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in the Creative Impulse, Gallery 400 presents “A Feminist Perspective on Gun Violence in Chicago: Screening and Performance.” The event includes two film screenings, Lonnie Edwards’ Parietal Guidance and Michael Paulucci’s Shirley’s Kids, followed by INGRAVESCO, a performance by RJ EL and Cheryl Pope in collaboration with young Chicago poets.

4:00-4:30 – Screenings
4:40-5:30 – Performance

Gallery 400 has presented more than 1,000 artists in its exhibitions and programs since its founding in 1983. In so doing, they strive to make complex works and ideas accessible to a broad spectrum of the public, advance and cultivate a variety of cultural and intellectual perspectives, and foster an interdisciplinary understanding of the visual arts.

 

For more information about Cheryl Pope, or her available work, please email info@markmooregallery.com

New works by painter Ali Smith are the current focus of the “Featured Works” section of Mark Moore Gallery’s website. Continuing with her interest in macro-versus-mirco structures, Smith pushes the boundaries of perception and context as her compositions toe the line between architectural and cellular forms. Rendered in her signature harlequin palette, these works conjure a sense of sensory excess and stimulation that appears luxuriant in these cold, technologically-driven times.

Ali Smith (b. 1976, Newport Beach, CA) uses the canvas as an open space of exploration; an empty landscape that serves as the starting point for investigation into abstract terrains. Her work illustrates the existential plight the artist has in finding new, personal meaning and direction within the field of abstract painting. The recurring visual trope of Rococo-like excess and abundance performs a celebratory re-assertion of the endless possibilities available to the painter. Smith weaves together fleeting thoughts, moments of time, the fine lines between fact and fiction and subjective desires within her canvases, which in turn present the hopeful attitude of the artist, in the face of the realities of life and experience.

Smith received her MFA from California State University, Long Beach (CA), and has since had solo exhibitions in New York, Houston and Los Angeles. She has been included in numerous group shows, including those at the Laguna Art Museum (CA), Irvine Fine Arts Center (CA), Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock (CA), and Riverside Museum (CA). Her work is included in the collections of the Laguna Art Museum (CA), Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (CA), Progressive (OH). The artist lives and works in Long Beach, CA.