Monthly Archives: April 2015

The gallery is pleased to announce Penelope Umbrico‘s current exhibition and project at the University of Toronto Art Centre, “Broken Steps and Haunted Scenes.” On view through May 30, 2015, the exhibition is presented in two separate but interrelated parts.

Says the institution:

Since the beginnings of photography, the camera has been used in service of a wide range of scientific pursuits, including medicine, physics, forensics, criminology, and botany. It has brought the news of the world and the glint of ice in a glass of whiskey. It has mapped every crater on the moon and spotted the Loch Ness Monster. None of this was done with the intentions of fine art, but contemporary artists have been deeply influenced by the tropes of vernacular photography.

The first part of the exhibition offers a look at the astonishing panoply of this photographic genre. Drawn from flea markets, personal albums, and private collections, the exhibition presents several coherent groupings of pictures, such as mugshots, insurance evidence, amateur self-portraits, psychic research, UFO sightings, and many others.

The second part presents a series of recent works by Toronto-native, New York-based artist Penelope Umbrico, who uses photographic imagery downloaded from the internet. Intimately involved with current vernacular photography, Umbrico employs traditional photographic techniques and methods of appropriation, extraction, multiple production, and intervention to explore how people, as a culture, make and use images. 

Together, the two parts of this exhibition present a certain arc across the history of vernacular photography. When culled from the proliferating archives—at the curatorial hand of the artist or the artistic hand of the curator—the compulsion toward photographic evidence that underpins this history comes up haunted by the vicissitudes of time, belief, prejudice, and ultimately, the betrayal of control and intention. 

Penelope Umbrico offers a radical reinterpretation of everyday consumer and vernacular images. Umbrico works “within the virtual world of consumer marketing and social media, traveling through the relentless flow of seductive images, objects, and information that surrounds us, searching for decisive moments—but in these worlds, decisive moments are cultural absurdities.”
She finds these moments in the pages of consumer product mail-order catalogs, travel and leisure brochures; and websites like Craigslist, EBay, and Flickr. Identifying image typologies—candy-colored horizons and sunsets, books used as props—brings the farcical, surreal nature of consumerism to new light.

Penelope Umbrico (born in Philadelphia, 1957) graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, and received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. She has participated extensively in solo and group exhibitions, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. Umbrico is core faculty in the School of Visual Arts MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media Program. Selected public collections include the Guggenheim Museum (NY), International Center of Photography (NY), McNay Museum of Art (TX), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Museum of Contemporary Photography (IL), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), Museum of Modern Art (NY), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), among others. She lives in New York City.

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

The gallery is pleased to present new works by program artist Zemer Peled. These pieces can be viewed by visiting the gallery’s “Featured Works” page on the website.

Zemer Peled’s work examines the beauty and brutality of the natural world. Her sculptural language is formed by her surrounding landscapes and nature, and engages with themes of memories, identity, and place. Her sculptures and installations consist of thousands of hand-crafted porcelain shards; a technique that yields a texture both delicate and severe. In some works, large scale-like ceramic pieces appear airy, delicate, and fluffy, as if one’s breath might break it. In others, Peled’s fragments are geometric barbs that mysteriously take on an alluring form – offering a sense of softness despite a sharp actuality.

Peled (b. 1983) was born and raised in a Kibbutz in the northern part of Israel. After completing her BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (Jerusalem), she earned her MA at the Royal College of Art (UK). In recent years, her work has been exhibited internationally, including such venues as Sotheby’s and Saatchi Gallery (London), Eretz Israel Museum (Tel Aviv), and the Orangerie du Senate (Paris), among others. The artist currently lives and works at the Archie Bray Foundation Residency (Helena, MT).

Currently on view at the James Gallery (through May 30, 2015) at City University of New York is “Left Coast: California Political Art,” featuring MMG’s Andrew Schoultz. Curated by Nadiah Fellah, the exhibition includes artworks from the 1980s to the present that focus on the spirit of protest and resistance, which has come to be synonymous with the West Coast in recent years.

The title of the exhibition takes its name from a playful moniker for the left-wing politics associated with California, a place that curator and art historian Peter Selz has referred to as “America’s edge.” By exploring how the roles of these artists cross into the realm of activism, the show brings to the fore timely political tensions and social movements that are unfolding across the country. The exhibition will feature sculptures, drawings, paintings, video and prints by several contemporary artists currently working in California, as well as newly commissioned works by Los Angeles-based artist Andrew Schoultz, the Bay Area-based mural collective Precita Eyes Mural Collective, and the international artist collectiveFuturefarmers, founded by San Francisco artist Amy Franceschini. Also included in the presentation are works by artists Judith F. Baca, Evan Bissell,Libby Black, Enrique Chagoya, Bruce Conner, Estudio Teddy Cruz with Fonna Forman, Jennifer Moon, PERSIA and DADDIE$ PLA$TIK, Lari Pittman,Rigo 23, Favianna Rodriguez, Martin Wong, and Imin Yeh. This exhibition is curated by Nadiah Fellah, the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow.

Sourcing inspiration from 15th Century German map making and Indian miniature paintings, Andrew Schoultz’s frenetic imagery depicts an ephemeral history bound to repeat itself. In his mixed-media works, notions of war, spirituality and sociopolitical imperialism are reoccurring themes, which shrewdly parallel an equally repetitive contemporary pursuit of accumulation and power. Intricate line work, painting, metal leaf and collage twist and undulate under Schoultz’s meticulous hand, ranging from intimately sized wall works to staggering murals and installations. While his illustrated world seems one of chaos and frenzy, Schoultz also implies a sense of alluring fantasy and whimsy – a crossroads vaguely familiar to the modern world.

Schoultz (b. 1975, WI) received his BFA from the Academy of Art University, San Francisco (CA). He has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Philadelphia, Rotterdam, Boston, London, Portland, Detroit and Milan. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Andy Warhol Museum (PA), Torrance Art Museum (CA), Havana Biennial (Cuba), Hyde Park Arts Center (IL), Laguna Art Museum (CA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), among others. His work can be seen in the public collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (CA) and the Progressive Art Collection (OH), in addition to his publicly funded murals in Portland (ME), Jogjakarta (Indonesia) and San Francisco (CA). Schoultz lives and works in San Francisco (CA).

The gallery is pleased to announce the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation Collection‘s (CA) acquisition of  “Reception 9” (2011) and “Telltale (Fire 1)” (2013) by Stephanie Washburn for its permanent collection.

The Foundation is dedicated to continuing the legacy and vision of Frederick R. Weisman, an extraordinary entrepreneur, philanthropist, and art collector. He held an uncompromising belief in the cultural value of art and understood the importance of both the individual artist and creative process. In carrying out Mr. Weisman’s intentions, the Foundation seeks to preserve, collect, and make publicly accessible his collection of modern and contemporary art as a means to strengthen and contribute to the greater artistic and intellectual life of our time. More than four hundred works of art are on display at the Foundation. The collection includes works by European Modernists including Cezanne, Picasso, and Kandinsky and Surrealist works by Ernst, Miro, and Magritte. The holdings in postwar art include works by Giacometti, Noguchi, Calder, Rauschenberg, and Johns; Abstract Expressionist paintings by de Kooning, Francis, Still, and Rothko; Color-Field paintings by Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland; and Pop Art by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, and Rosenquist. Contemporary California works include those by Ruscha and Goode, and Super Realist sculptures by Hanson and de Andrea.

Stephanie Washburn (1980, MA) works in various media including drawing, painting, photography, and video. Her practice explores the material digital interface and the persistence of the body and human touch in pictorial space. Washburn combines everyday materials and televised imagery to stage a series of photographs. The images that result generate a range of painterly abstractions and counter narratives to the programmed content flickering beneath. With references to Abstract Expressionism, feminist art practice, and early performance, they pose a real physicality as the dramatic player in the fictive space of both the digital spectacle and her own hybrid image making.

Washburn received her MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work has been exhibited at The University Art Museum (CA), The Palms Bar (CA), Atkinson Gallery (CA), Santa Barbara Museum of Art (CA), Eagle Rock Center for the Arts (CA), Los Angeles Municipal Gallery (CA) and Davidson Art Center (CT). Washburn’s photographs have been acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA) and Sweeney Art Gallery at UC Riverside (CA). She currently lives and works between Ojai and Los Angeles.

The gallery is proud to announce the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego‘s acquisition of “Lake Project #6” by David Maisel for its permanent collection.

Founded in 1941 as The Art Center in La Jolla, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) has evolved into an organization of national and international renown. The collection includes more than 4,000 works created since 1950, and reflects an artistic program that encourages promising emerging artists and recognizes mid-career artists whose work deserves more visibility. The Museum serves the region as a vital cultural and civic asset, with contemporary art and living artists at its core.

David Maisel is a visual artist based in San Francisco, CA. His 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 more information about the artist or available work, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

The gallery is very pleased to announce the Norton Museum of Art‘s acquisition of David Maisel‘s “Lake Project #2” for its permanent collection.

The Lake Project comprises images from Owens Lake, the site of a formerly 200 square-mile lake in California on the eastern side of the Sierra Mountains. Beginning in 1913, the Owens River was diverted into the Owens Valley Aqueduct, to bring water to Los Angeles. By 1926, the lake had been depleted, exposing vast mineral flats and transforming a fertile valley into an arid landscape. For decades, fierce winds have dislodged microscopic particles from the lakebed, creating carcinogenic dust storms. Indeed, the site has become the highest source of particulate matter pollution in the United States, emitting 300,000 tons annually of cadmium, chromium, arsenic and other materials. The concentration of minerals in the remaining water yields blooms of microscopic bacteria, turning the liquid a deep, bloody red. The lake has become the locus of water’s absence, a negation of itself, a void. The images serve, in a sense, as the lake’s autopsy. Viewed from the air, vestiges of the lake appear as a river of blood, a microchip, a bisected vein, or a galaxy’s map. It is this contemporary version of the sublime that Maisel finds find compelling– a strange beauty born of environmental degradation.

The Norton Museum of Art was founded in 1941 by Ralph Hubbard Norton (1875–1953) and his wife, Elizabeth Calhoun Norton (1881–1947). The Nortons were actively interested in fine arts and developed a sizable collection of paintings and sculpture. The Museum Collection consists of 7,000+ works of art concentrated in the following departments: European, American, Chinese, Contemporary and Photography.   

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

The gallery is pleased to share David Maisel‘s inclusion in “The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Opening on May 3, the exhibition will also feature Sophie Calle, Chuck Close, Linda Connor, Moyra Davey,Binh Danh, Adam Fuss, Idris Khan, Vera Lutter, Carrie Mae Weems, Sally Mann, Andrew Moore, Chris McCaw, and others.

The exhibition explores the complexity of the medium’s relationship to time, memory, and history. Seventy-six works by 26 international artists will be presented at the Gallery for the first time. “The Memory of Time” is one of three stellar exhibitions that will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the National Gallery of Art’s photography program.

Concurrently on view through May 3 at Mark Moore Gallery is the artist’s most recent body of work, “The Fall.”

Maisel was commissioned to photograph the city of Toledo, Spain, for ToledoContemporánea, an exhibition created to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the death of the painter El Greco. “The Fall” is Maisel’s personal response to the landscape between Toledo and Madrid, in which he reveals topographies that have been aesthetically deranged and environmentally impacted by industrial use. From abandoned construction sites in Vicalvaro, ashen extraction zones in Borox, and crosshatched fields in Fuensalida, Maisel constructs a hallucinatory and alien worldview. Speaking to this, the artist says, “The baser the terrain, the more susceptible it is to contemplation, and the more complex it becomes as subject matter; I consider my pictures not as simply documents of these blighted regions, but as poetic renderings that reflect the human psyche that made them.” Maisel’s painterly abstractions in The Fall reference a variety of sources, from the landscapes of Richard Diebenkorn to the lunar renderings of NASA.

Maisel’s work has been exhibited globally, including such institutions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); International Center of Photography (NY); Palais de Tokyo (Paris); Fotografie Forum International (Frankfurt); American Academy (Rome); Musée 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 (Washington D.C.), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), and many others. He received his BA from Princeton University, studied at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and received his MFA from California College of the Arts. 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. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Center for Cultural Innovation. He was appointed a Trustee of the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2011. The artist lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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

The gallery is pleased to announce Penelope Umbrico‘s upcoming solo project at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT), “Shallow Sun,” which opens on Sunday, May 3, 2015, and will remain on view through October 25, 2015.

The project is part of the museum’s grand-scale semester theme, “Circumstance.” Curated by Richard Klein,  the museum will highlight inspiration and its influence across object-making, through the specifically commissioned work of six multi-generational artists, including Umbrico. Says Klein:

The exhibition will underscore the intersection of installation art and exhibition design, and show how the convergence of fine art, design, and non-art objects within the exhibition format informs and elucidates creative expression. For six months, the entire museum facility—whose distinctive galleries range from the intimate to the spacious—will be transformed into “rooms” designed by the exhibiting artists, which will “read” as total works of art as they show their own work alongside objects and/or artworks by other artists they have selected. In some instances, works may extend outside of the Museum’s walls, providing alternative ways of perceiving space by offering extended lines of sight across the campus. In doing so, “Circumstance” attempts to explore the interstices where art and object come together, come apart, and reunify, by examining context, its many shifts and permutations, and tracing the movement of art and objects from the studio to the museum.

Umbrico’s dedicated gallery show within the museum, titled “Shallow Sun,” places her practice in the continuum of the evolving history of photographic imagery. The Museum’s camera obscura will become a starting point to explore the technologies of both analog and digital reproduction and how we are at a point where light—traditionally the most central element of photography—has become disembodied from the natural world, experienced solely through the screen via digital algorithms that replicate our nostalgia for it. 

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

Interdisciplinary gallery artist Kim Rugg will have work included in “Rock, Paper, Scissors: Drawn from the JoAnn Gonzalez Hickey Collection” at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PA), opening on May 15th. The exhibition will remain on view through November 1, 2015, and grapples mostly with modern ideas pertaining to the practice of drawing. Says the institution:

What is drawing? While seemingly straightforward, the potential answers to this question are innumerable and complex. Some may see drawing as practice for a larger work in another medium; a system of note taking; a substitute for the camera; an act vital to artistic, spiritual, or intellectual growth; the primary focus of art; a method for experiment and risk; not confined to two dimensions; an extension of the body; everything.

Drawing is essential in the contemporary art world. The number of artists who identify primarily as practitioners of drawing is great; many artists move between drawing and other previously privileged practices without making hierarchical distinctions. The number of forms drawing can take is extraordinary and surprising; artists regularly expand the vocabulary for art through drawing.

“Rock, Paper, Scissors” features selections from the JoAnn Gonzalez Hickey collection made by students in PAFA’s Fall 2014 Advanced Drawing seminar led by PAFA’s Senior Curator, Robert Cozzolino and artist/faculty member Astrid Bowlby. As the course progressed, the students brought their studio experience, class discussions, and experience with original artwork and the broader art world to shape the exhibition.  Students established a relationship with Hickey and explored her collection, an invitation made possible through her SYZYGY curatorial platform for study.  The result is an unusual curatorial project full of discovery.

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

Mark Moore Gallery is proud to announce the Albright-Knox Art Gallery‘s acquisition of “Idyllwild” (2011) by Allison Schulnik for its permanent collection, as well as an edition copy of the artist’s 2011 video, “Mound.”

Founded officially in December 1862, The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy—the governing body of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery—is among the country’s oldest public arts institutions in the United States. Since its inception as The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, the museum has been dedicated to acquiring, exhibiting, and preserving modern and contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on the collection, presentation, and interpretation of the artistic expressions of our times. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s 150-year tradition of collecting, conserving, and exhibiting the art of its time has given rise to one of the world’s most extraordinary art collections. Thomas Hoving, art historian and former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, said that “the Albright-Knox Art Gallery should be on everyone’s list to see, for it’s an overwhelming art experience. Small, intimate, and seductive, the museum has one of the most thumping modern and contemporary collections in the world.”

Allison Schulnik choreographs her subjects in compositions that embody a spirit of the macabre, a Shakespearian comedy/tragedy of love, death and farce. The subjects often stare back at the audience and study them as they are in turn studied, aware of their ancestors from the Grand Theme works of the past, the genre paintings that inform them. Although a haunting sense of foreboding, discomfort and unease is palpable, a sense of understanding, compassion and hopefulness for her cast of characters is still evident in the heavy impasto paintings. Her sculptural use of oil paint references her clay-animation background, as a motion-like sensibility affords her paintings unparalleled depth and energy.

Born in 1978 (San Diego, CA), Schulnik earned her BFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (CA). She has had solo exhibitions at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OK), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Rokeby Gallery (London), Unosunove Arte Contemporanea (Rome), Division Gallery (Montreal), and ZieherSmith Gallery (NY), in addition to her inclusion in film festivals around the world. Her work has also been shown at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture (Moscow), Hammer Museum (CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Santa Barbara Museum of Art (CA), Contemporary Arts Museum (LA), and Hangar-7 (Salzburg), among many others. Allison Schulnik’s work is in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), Santa Barbara Art Museum (CA), Museé de Beaux Arts (Montreal), Farnsworth Art Museum (ME), Laguna Art Museum (CA), Montreal Contemporary Art Museum (Canada), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (CT), and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Canada). The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.