Monthly Archives: May 2015

The gallery is pleased to announce that the major installation, “Wishy Washy” (2006), by artist duo the Clayton Brothers, has been acquired by the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster (CA). Now a part of the museum’s permanent collection, “Wishy Washy” will soon be on display at the institution – an opportunity that will best showcase the work’s dimensional, audible, and interactive components.

The Lancaster Museum of Art and History is dedicated to strengthening awareness, enhancing accessibility and igniting the appreciation of art, history and culture in the Antelope Valley through dynamic exhibitions, innovative educational programs, creative community engagement and a vibrant collection that celebrates the richness of the region. The Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH) is home to over 10,000 objects, spanning the creative and technological achievements of the Antelope Valley from Native Americans to American Pioneers. In addition, other holdings include historic American military artifacts, prehistoric fossil specimens, and ancient Egyptian artifacts. MOAH’s collection of art is the finest in the Antelope Valley and is comprised of an expanding collection of western, modern and contemporary art. MOAH’s art collection consists of varied media including painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture spanning the early 1900’s to contemporary times. Noteworthy artists within the historic collection includes Van Saake, La Monk, Lee, and Burgess. The specialized Eglash Collection focuses on contemporary art makers of Southern California. In addition, the Museum houses encyclopedic holdings of historic period clothing and textiles as well as prints, drawings, archival materials, and photographs that are displayed in rotation for reasons of preservation.

For brothers Rob and Christian Clayton, collaboration is more than a process: the concept of symbiosis resonates through every aspect of their paintings and installations. In a practice devoid of ego and restraint, the Clayton brothers develop intensely compacted narratives on an intuitive basis. Rob and Christian Clayton seldom work on the same canvas at the same time, or discuss their projects during their creation. Playing off of a uniquely unspoken synergy, they take turns inventing, adding to, and editing each piece, propelling their “stories” through spontaneous improvisation. Entwining their independent approaches, styles, and palettes, their works operate as co-authored epics, fusing the concept of self with the communal.

Working from their Los Angeles studio, the Clayton brothers draw inspiration from their immediate environment by incorporating local businesses, neighborhood regulars, and snippets of overheard conversations as subjects for their paintings. Composing their pieces in conjunction with one another, recurrent motifs, gestures, places, and figures appear within different works; creating the drama of linked experience. Set upon collaged canvases, the physical layers of their surfaces create a condensed tableaux. The brothers approach painting as a visual representation of pure energy: everyday scenes explode in vortexes of blinding color, movement is practically animated, and products make their placement, an effect similar to viewing every frame of a film simultaneously. In presenting a specific locality, the Clayton brothers relate the personal to the global, but still offer a vision of “America-as-it-is.” In turn, they celebrate and share all of its diverse, spectacular, and solitary splendor.

Rob (b. 1963, OH) and Christian (b. 1967, CO) Clayton both received their B.F.A.s from Art Center College of Design (CA). They have had solo exhibitions at the Pasadena Museum of California Art (CA), and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (WI) in addition to shows in Houston, New York, Beijing, Los Angeles, and Miami. Their work has also been included in shows at the Museum of the Moving Image (NY), Santa Monica Museum of Art (CA), Laguna Art Museum (CA), Kistler Beach Museum of Art (KS), Corcoran Museum of Art (DC), and the Dallas Museum of Art (TX), among others. They have also participated in more than twenty visiting artist lectures around the world, and their work appears in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), Norton Museum of Art (FL), Sweeney Art Gallery at the University of California, Riverside (CA), and the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art (CA). The artists both live and work in Los Angeles, CA.

On Saturday, May 23, gallery artist David Ryan will open a solo exhibition of new work at Galerie Richard in Paris, France. Says the gallery;

David Ryan established his reputation with his bas-reliefs composed of monochromatic panels, combined by superimposed layers with dynamic compositions,  and refined unexpected color arrangement.

The pulled paint of new works becomes the captured gesture which informs every layer building out to the ultimate defining edge. Compared with dynamic and powerful large works shown in his last exhibition in 2014 at Galerie Richard, New York, new works are quite small, with thiner layers of PVC which contribute to create an intimate connection between the viewer and the work.

David Ryan, born in 1971 lives and works in Las Vegas. He received BFA at Texas University, Austin and MFA at Nevada University, Las Vegas. His works are in the collections of Contemporary Art Museum of San Diego, Museum of Palm Springs, Las Vegas Museum, Weissman Foundation, Los Angeles, Borusan Center of Arts and Culture, Istanbul.

The opening reception will take place from 5-9pm on May 23. For additional images or information about the artist, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

Flatlander, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s summer exhibition, features works by ten artists who explore how our compulsive relationship with the flat screen and the Internet has changed our view of the world. Gallery artist Penelope Umbrico will have work in the exhibition.

Join guest curator Patty Ortiz and the exhibiting artists for the opening reception tomorrow, Thursday, May 21, from 6:30-9pm. Admission for the public is free.

Miss the opening reception for Julie Heffernan‘s current solo exhibition? Fear not – we’ve got a video interview with the artist ready for you. Watch the full length interview on Vimeo now!

“Pre-Occupations” remains on view through June 13, 2015. 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 Stephanie Washburn. These pieces can be viewed by visiting the gallery’s “Featured Works” page on the website.

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), the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation Collection, and Sweeney Art Gallery at UC Riverside (CA). She currently lives and works between Ojai and Los Angeles.

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

The gallery is proud to announce the Portland Art Museum‘s acquisition of  “18_IMG_6697-a” (2014) by Penelope Umbrico for its permanent collection.

The oldest art museum in the Pacific Northwest, the Portland Art Museum was founded in late 1892 when seven leaders from Portland’s business and cultural institutions created the Portland Art Association. The goal of the Association was to create a first-class art museum that would be accessible to all citizens. With more than 42,000 works of art, 121,000 square feet of galleries, and the Northwest Film Center, the Museum provides a comprehensive opportunity to view some of man’s greatest creative achievements. From its earliest days, the Museum has closely followed and supported contemporary art. In 1908, the Museum acquired its first original painting, created by the American Impressionist Childe Hassam in the same year. In 1905 and 1913, exhibitions of avant-garde art were presented at the Museum, including Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and other momentous works from the controversial 1913 Armory Show in New York.

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.

The gallery is proud to announce Joshua Dildine‘s first solo exhibition in New York City, taking place at Freight + Volume ; May 21 – June 20, 2015. An opening reception will be held from 6-9pm on May 21st in celebration of this show.

Titled, “Notating Hi Pops,” the exhibition casts a wry and languid glance at appropriation, and picking up where the “Pictures” generation left off. Says the gallery:

“Dildine’s new paintings have a reckless yet controlled flair, which utilize autobiographical family album photographs – including prom pictures, wedding pictures, baby’s first step, vacation memories, etc. – and turn sentiment and nostalgia on its head.  His visceral gesture and accelerated brushstroke are loaded with sensual energy, harkening to the Ab-Ex days of pure delight and mystery in paint, yet placing these gestures on top of faded, kitchy, sometimes cloying memorabilia.  The fifties photo meets the fifties painting yet the end result inhabits a quintessentially new timeline – an artist’s 2015 Facebook universe gone awry.

Dildine also toys with perspective quite literally.  In works humorously titled (a la Ogden Nash or E.E. Cummings’ poems), ‘Dang Darn Pad and Odd’ and ‘A Bad Dodger Shunts Tot,’ the artist turns the horizon upside down and suggests an implosion of worlds colliding: interior facing off with exterior.  The brushstroke careens this way and that and leads us in and out of memory, into the present and beyond.  Like a Jetson’s tour through Ab-Ex painting, Dildine seems to say – ‘buckle up and follow me through a Cliff Notes speed read of 50s, 60s ,70s and even 80s expressionism – and hang on tight.’  It’s a Fun House hall of mirrors and we, as viewers, are simply along for the ride, roller coaster style, with the artist as our fearless guide.”

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). His work is included in the public collection of the Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California Riverside (Riverside, CA). He was also the recipient of the 2010 Claremont Graduate University Award. The artist lives and works in Claremont, CA.

Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Julie Heffernan, the artist’s third solo show at the gallery. Continuing what has become a hallmark series of self-portraits, Heffernan has developed a unique and fertile visual lexicon, which deftly combines themes of the personal with the political, the universal with the individual, and the familiar with the fantastical.

At the heart of the work is a palpable, grave concern for the environment. Issues of climate change, overpopulation and ecological imbalance are presented in highly ornate, dreamlike tableaux, rife with symbolism and allegorical implication. Although Heffernan’s compositions carry a clear reverence for the style and tradition of historical narrative painting, her imagery is not tethered to a specific genre, period or ideology, but rather blossoms directly from the imagination, expounding on Surrealism’s notion of the subconscious as the architect of reality.

Despite their sobering subject matter, Heffernan’s works are empowered by a sense of cautious optimism, wherein social critique is not the endgame. Rather than focusing solely on the causes and symptoms of our global maladies, Heffernan’s canvases are alive with possibility, imagining creative ways in which we might prevail over our own undoing. The artist states: “The work is a continuation of my interest in climate change and the kinds of changes we are going to have to consider in order to deal with some of its eventualities – perhaps an opportunity for some creativity in how we approach habitats and lifestyles. No more room for wastefulness, but what do we decide to keep and what to get rid of? The figures are now engaged in work of some sort: pulling, dragging, wrestling with materials in order to start the work of change.”

Heffernan (b. 1956, Illinois) received her MFA from Yale School of Art (CT), and has been exhibiting widely for the past two decades. She is currently Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ. Selected exhibitions include: The Kwangju Biennial (Korea), Weatherspoon Art Gallery (NC), The Me Museum (Berlin), Knoxville Museum Of Art (TN), Columbia Museum Of Art (SC), Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), The New Museum (NY), The Norton Museum (FL), The American Academy Of Arts And Letters (NY), Kohler Arts Center (WI), The Palmer Museum Of Art (PA), National Academy Of Art (NY), McNay Art Museum (TX), Herter Art Gallery (MA), Mint Museum (NC), Virginia Museum of Fine Art (VA), and Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OK) among numerous others. Her work has also been acquired by many of the institutions listed above.

Concurrently in Gallery Two, MMG presents In Bloom, a group show featuring new work by ten gallery artists in addition to the exhibition’s keystone: Andy Warhol.

The exhibition was developed as a “call and response” to Andy Warhol’s iconic flower images from the early 1960s. The gallery requested that each invited artist create a new piece similar in scale to Warhol’s original 14 x 14″ canvases, that also addressed concepts inherent to Warhol’s work: derivations on the art historical still life, mechanization of art-making, and the convergence of fine art and pop culture. As the current nature of art and commerce has facilitated industry-wide conversations about the evolving role of artists, galleries, museums, art fairs, and the Internet, Warhol’s philosophies appear more topical and relevant than ever before.

Considering this simple framework, incredibly diverse approaches and techniques were employed, given the practices of each artist. Certain individuals approached the theme from an art historical perspective, focusing on the perception and tradition of still life, landscape, and pastoral imagery, as can be seen in the works of David Klamen and Allison Schulnik. Gallery newcomer Zemer Peled contributes a sensuous wall-mounted ceramic sculpture ornately assembled from shattered pieces of blue and white porcelain, while Kim Rugg’s work is an intricate quilted rendition of the “newsworthiness” of Warhol’s own imagery – both testaments to the increasing lack of handcraft in recent contemporary art. Penelope Umbrico also confronts issues pertaining to image authorship and the exclusivity of the art world by “appropriating” Warhol’s image from Art.com, and up-ending the famed artist’s own interest in mass produced icons.

Others have taken a looser thematic direction, addressing the state of the art world in a less conventional manner. For instance, Ben Weiner’s Orange Flowers do not contain any recognizable imagery, but were created by soaking paper in a mixture of orange ink and opium, a drug famously derived from poppies (the flower depicted in Warhol’s flower series). Long-time gallery artist Vernon Fisher takes a similarly abstruse approach, presenting an uncharacteristically small work, APrIL, which entreats the viewer to contemplate T.S. Eliot’s notion of springtime as it relates to mortality. Similarly, Andrew Schoultz’s geometric iconography illustrates his trademark concerns about imperialist and globalized realities – but now as they relate to the art market – while Christopher Russell’s sublimely clement, hand-scratched photographs reveal a purity only found in authentic, natural experiences in nature. In Bloom uncovers a through-line between artists with disparate practices and preoccupations, prompting a larger “art world” dialogue that is truly Warholian.

The gallery is proud to announce the Portland Art Museum‘s acquisition of “Ghost Ship Wreck (1)” (2010) by Christopher Russell for its permanent collection.

The oldest art museum in the Pacific Northwest, the Portland Art Museum was founded in late 1892 when seven leaders from Portland’s business and cultural institutions created the Portland Art Association. The goal of the Association was to create a first-class art museum that would be accessible to all citizens. With more than 42,000 works of art, 121,000 square feet of galleries, and the Northwest Film Center, the Museum provides a comprehensive opportunity to view some of man’s greatest creative achievements. From its earliest days, the Museum has closely followed and supported contemporary art. In 1908, the Museum acquired its first original painting, created by the American Impressionist Childe Hassam in the same year. In 1905 and 1913, exhibitions of avant-garde art were presented at the Museum, including Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and other momentous works from the controversial 1913 Armory Show in New York.

Dealing less with the supernatural than the psychosomatic, Christopher Russell rouses ghosts. Within his scratched photographs, fractured glass panes, and hazy metallic paints, there are haunting recollections – the kind of outlier memories that plague our psyche well after childhood. Through a purposefully repressive fog, we habitually revisit the monsters of our innermost mentality, and find ourselves the protagonist of a lifelong plight – a cinematic tale evocatively illustrated by Russell’s eerie ships and spectral trees. Like a folkloric odyssey into a cognitive web, his mixed-media works and installations traipse through places of fragility and wistfulness; evidence of the divine and unsettling encounters inherent to our complex mortality.

Russell (b. 1974) received his M.F.A. from the Art Center College of Design (CA). In 2009, he produced a solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA). He has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Tokyo Institute of Photography (Japan), The Norton Museum (West Palm Beach, FL), Armory Center for the Arts (Los Angeles, CA), White Columns (New York, NY) De Appel Arts Center (Netherlands) Oakland Museum (Oakland, CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), among others. He has published numerous critical articles in addition to being a featured subject of positive review by the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Huffington Post, Artillery, Frieze, and ArtForum, among others. Russell is also known for his ‘zine Bedwetter. His first novel is Sniper, and other books include Budget Decadence (2nd Cannons Publications), Pattern Book (Insert Blanc Press) and Landscape (Kolapsomal Press)–which was included in Martin Parr’s The Photobook: A History Volume III (Phaidon). His work is included in the collections of numerous public institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art – University of Oregon, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Hammer Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, to name a few.