Mark Moore Fine Art Blog

Gallery artist Penelope Umbrico is featured in an article by Hyperallergic, “Mining Flickr for 1 Million Moons” by Claire Voon.

“The title Silvery Light refers directly to Umbrico’s gleaming subject, but it also alludes to the role of light in shaping our understanding of an image. A number of her works are collections of screenshots she took of images found through Flickr’s filter-by-color tool, presenting all pink and all blue moons. Another collection, “Screenshot 2015-11-24 / Dark as Light” (2015), where images are shown like specimens in thick-framed boxes, consists of screenshots of moons, whose colors she inverted, with each false moon easily passable as the real deal. These series raise questions over how faithful the images we encounter are to reality, not just due to post-production changes but also because of how technology and the screen define our experience of color.”

To read the article in it’s entirety click here.

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

Gallery artist Stephanie Washburn is part of Shift, Stretch, Expand: Everyday Transformations at Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara.

MCASB Satellite @ Hotel Indigo Santa Barbara presents Shift, Stretch, Expand: Everyday Transformations, an exhibition of nine artists from Santa Barbara that explores the quiet and inconspicuous operations of everyday existence.

In our daily comings and goings, within and around us, things are in a constant state of transformation: water, currency, alliances, and surfaces, to name just a few. While passing through space or interacting with others, in every instance subtle shifts affect our experience. Whether obvious or understated, or even invisible, these occurrences alter the ways in which we perceive our realities. The exhibition, taking place throughout the interior and exterior spaces of MCASB’s satellite site, a boutique art hotel, presents artists who investigate these changes in vastly different ways. The artists focus on conditions of transformation, including points at which limits are questioned, thresholds are crossed, frames of reference are destabilized, and expectations are subverted.

Curated by Brooke Kellaway, Associate Curator.

Gallery artist Ryan Wallace was recently chosen by ArtForum as a Critic’s Pick for his current solo exhibition at Cooper Cole (Toronto). Continuing the themes and techniques featured in his 2015 exhibition at Mark Moore Gallery, Wallace has extended his signature textured multi-media methodology from the canvas into the gallery space itself. We congratulate the artist on this milestone achievement. Please find the review by Bryne McLaughlin in its entirety below:

The instant you step inside the gallery door, you’re implicated in Ryan Wallace’s exhibition “Dragnalus.” Spread out underfoot across the space is Pitch, 2016, a patchwork of square Plexiglas tiles, each roughly imprinted with evidence of Wallace’s working methods—footprints in paint, offcut strips of packing tape and mesh, a flattened work glove or pair of jeans, and traces of spray paint and carpet glue, among other things. Interspersed throughout this blue-collar mosaic are squares covered in gold and silver foil or mirrors. Walking on “Pitch,” it’s impossible not to think of how heavily this, and the work of many young like-minded sculptural painters, treads on the legacy of Carl Andre. Earlier iterations of similar pieces by Wallace have included stacks of plaster cubes, another allusion to Andre’s Minimalist shadow. But here it’s less of a flaw than a self-reflexive reminder of how questions of process, material, value, and the negotiated play between object and subject have perpetual traction.

Wallace’s paintings operate in a similar fashion. In his “Dragnalus” series, 2014–15, vertical cuts and strips of canvas, mesh, vinyl, rubber, aluminum foil, wax, and paint—the same bric-a-brac from Wallace’s workspace that covers the tiles in “Pitch”—form a suite of densely textured veils. A departure from his earlier monochromatic paintings, these works hum with layered blacks, off-whites, deep reds, and a well-placed eyelet or two. The linchpin, though, is “Untitled,” 2016, a pair of white canvas sneakers hanging on the gallery wall, the soles of which are caked in studio detritus. Echoes of the labor-intensive heroics of the midcentury avant-garde—“Combines”-era Robert Rauschenberg comes to mind—resound again, even if, for better or worse, they remain just a step away.

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

“Hoof,” the current solo exhibition by Allison Schulnik, will close on Saturday, February 20.

The first Los Angeles solo exhibition by Schulnik in nearly four years was met with strong preview support from Arrested Motion, CalArts Blog, and Artsy Editorial, which did an extensive interview feature with the artist in her studio. Says writer Rachel Will:

“Cats don’t only make appearances at Schulnik’s studio but also in her latest exhibition ‘Hoof’ at Mark Moore Gallery. One of the paintings in the show, ‘Lady with Cat’ (2015), is derived from a photo of Schulnik holding her own cat, reimagined with haunting eyes and a morose color palette of black, dark browns, and blues, typical of her oeuvre. But beyond cats, her paintings are inhabited by centaurettes, unicorns, and mermaids—not those of Disney films and children’s books but rather of nightmares and fairy tales gone awry. Her work portrays seemingly vulnerable heroines, ensconced in fields of pastel wildflowers, imbued with a quiet grace and strength.”

“Hoof” was also selected by critic Catherine Wagley as one of her “5 Must-See Shows in Los Angeles.” In her humorous assessment of the show, Wagley writes:

“The best two things about Allison Schulnik’s show at Mark Moore Gallery are nipples and cats. Schulnik’s painted and ceramic figures — all female, long-haired, loosely rendered and wild-looking (some are half-woman, half-horse centaurettes) — tend to have the most remarkable, pink, tube-like nipples at the ends of their breasts. They’re like weapons, guns that could go off. And then there are the cats, vulnerable and silly while the women are fierce. Writhing Boochie is a black ceramic cat lying on its back on a pink pedestal, looking like a diva who’s sick of being pretty.”

For information about the artist or available works, please email the gallery, and we will accommodate your needs. The gallery’s next exhibition will open on Thursday, February 25, from 6-8:30pm; featuring new work by Jason Salavon in the main gallery, and Lester Monzon in Gallery Two.

Vernon Fisher is part of a group exhibition opening tomorrow at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum titled, “The End of Innocence: Childhood Torments in the Contemporary Art Collection.”

The fairy-tale notion of childhood as a happy and carefree time of innocence and play is challenged by the artwork presented in this exhibition. At their worst, early experiences can provide the first shocking realizations of evil and pain in the world. The End of Innocence explores these difficult and lingering early life memories, fantasies, and nightmares in works that address issues such as loneliness, bullying, racism, poverty, violence, and war. Making reference to childhood, much of the art contains cartoons, dolls, toys, coloring books, the alphabet, school photographs, and TV shows.

Drawn entirely from the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Contemporary Art collection, Fisher will be showing alongside Eleanor Antin, Morton Bartlett, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Joseph Cornell, Vanessa German, Keith Haring, Charles LeDray, David Levinthal, Pepón Osorio, Collier Schorr, Deb Sokolow, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz.

Click here for more information on the exhibition.

Andrew Schoultz recently completed a mural in LA’s Chinatown in collaboration with Converse as part of their Blank Canvas Program..

See the mural come to life in this new video about the project:

David Maisel is in Wired Magazine this month for his groundbreaking series The Fall, now on view at Haines Gallery.

Click here to read the article.

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

The gallery is thrilled to announce the Blanton Museum‘s acquisition of “The View from Oklahoma (Kim’s Valley North of Amarillo)” (2014), by Kim Rugg.

The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin is one of the foremost university art museums in the country, and has the largest and most comprehensive collection of art in Central Texas. The Blanton’s permanent collection of more than 17,000 works is recognized for its European paintings, an encyclopedic collection of prints and drawings, and modern and contemporary American and Latin American art.

The Blanton is considered one of the university’s many Gems along with The Harry Ransom Center, the Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas Press, UT Libraries, the Graduate School, and the Michener Center for Writers. Located at the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Congress Avenue, the museum is across the street from the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum and is adjacent to downtown Austin.

With surgical blades and a meticulous hand, Kim Rugg (b. 1963, Canada) dissects and reassembles newspapers, stamps, comic books, cereal boxes and postage stamps in order to render them conventionally illegible. The front page of the LA Times becomes neatly alphabetized jargon, debunking the illusion of its producers’ authority as much as the message itself. Through her re-appropriation of medium and meaning, she effectively highlights the innately slanted nature of the distribution of information as well as its messengers. Rugg has also created hand-drawn works alongside wallpaper installations, both of which toy with authenticity and falsehood through subtle trompe l’oeil. 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.

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

Gallery artist Stephanie Washburn is in Sibling Rivalries, a group show up now at Torrance Art Museum.

Sibling Rivalries is  a group exhibition of work by 14 artists based in Los Angeles and 14 from New York City. Curators Ashley Garrett and Max Presneill invited emerging and experimental art spaces in the New York area to nominate fourteen emerging New York artists. These fourteen New York artists then chose fourteen corresponding Los Angeles artists whose work spoke to, inspired and/or informed their own practices.

Taking as its point of departure the historic competition between the East and West coasts, Sibling Rivalries transforms the traditional “competitive” understanding of the term. In this exhibition, “sibling rivalry” expands to encompass a dynamic interaction between art practices occurring in the two primary art and culture production centers of the United States. Here the tensions of East Coast / West Coast rivalry illuminate contrasting approaches to mutual concerns.

Click here to learn more about the exhibition.

The gallery is pleased to announce Milwaukee Art Museum’s acquisition of Explosion #26 (2014), by Christopher Russell, for their permanent collection.

The Milwaukee Art Museum collects and preserves art, presenting it to the community as a vital source of inspiration and education. 30,000 works of art. 400,000+ visitors a year. 125 years of collecting art. From its roots in Milwaukee’s first art gallery in 1888, the Museum has grown today to be an icon for Milwaukee and a resource for the entire state.

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.