Mark Moore Fine Art Blog

Gallery artist David Maisel‘s recent show at Haines Gallery was reviewed in Photograph Mag by art critic Glen Helfand.

Helfand writes:

“The Spanish images are quieter, revealing the ravages more ambiguously, partly because the human interventions appear less directly invasive, but also because of Maisel’s evolving use of aerial perspective. But the result is that they may reflect a contemporary condition in which environmental catastrophe is too enormous to parse. It’s difficult to interpret the source of the curlicue Brice Marden-ish crop circles in The Fall (Borox 6), 2013. The rounded grid in The Fall (Vicalvaro 3), resembles an ancient civilization on the moon, though the artist’s website describes it as an area outside Madrid where development stalled due to 2008 economic collapse. Maisel’s best works result when this kind of descriptive information merges with the disorienting beauty of a heightened perspective.”

Read the article here.

Allison Schulnik’s film,  Mound (2011) is the subject of a new article on ThePhotoPhore.

Check out the article here.

See Mound in entirety here.

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

The gallery is pleased to announce the acquisition of Penelope Umbrico’s major work, Sunsets from Flickr (2015), by Milwaukee Art Museum 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.

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.

The gallery is pleased to announce the acquisition of “Tattoo Flash”(2011) by Okay Mountain for the permanent collection of LA County Museum of Art (CA).

Since its inception in 1965, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has been devoted to collecting works of art that span both history and geography, in addition to representing Los Angeles’s uniquely diverse population. Today LACMA is the largest art museum in the western United States, with a collection that includes over 120,000 objects dating from antiquity to the present, encompassing the geographic world and nearly the entire history of art. Among the museum’s strengths are its holdings of Asian art, Latin American art, ranging from pre-Columbian masterpieces to works by leading modern and contemporary artists; and Islamic art, of which LACMA hosts one of the most significant collections in the world. A museum of international stature as well as a vital part of Southern California, LACMA shares its vast collections through exhibitions, public programs, and research facilities that attract over a million visitors annually, in addition to serving millions through digital initiatives, such as online collections, scholarly catalogues, and interactive engagement at lacma.org. Situated in Hancock Park on over 20 acres in the heart of Los Angeles, LACMA is located between the ocean and downtown.

Okay Mountain is a nine member artist collective based in Austin, Texas. Formed in 2006 as an artist-run alternative gallery space, the group has exhibited their drawing, video, sound, and performance projects throughout the United States and in Mexico City, and has been widely recognized for its “inventive construction, loving attention to detail and keen-eyed connoisseurship.” Okay Mountain repackages, reconstitutes, and rekindles our consumerist desires with a sardonic edge. Their installations and multi-media assemblage works mimic the stock vernacular of our communal materialism, yet tweak them just enough to reveal our superficial insecurities and convictions.

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

Gallery artist Christopher Russell will speak at Photo LA as part of a panel titled, ” ALT Process, Artists Working in Alternative Practices.”

Moderated by: Virginia Heckert
Curator, Department of Photographs, The J. Paul Getty Museum

Fuelled in part by the digital revolution and its increasingly ubiquitous technologies for producing and disseminating images, many photographic artists choose to experiment with alternative processes that provide opportunities for hands-on engagement with the materials of the medium. Whether revived from previous centuries of photographic invention and discovery, informed by scientific collaboration, or borrowed from other arts, these alternative processes have the capacity to imbue the medium of photography with a new vigor. Virginia Heckert, Photographs Curator and Department Head at the J. Paul Getty Museum and curator of last year’s Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography exhibition, will moderate a panel of artists who have embraced alternative processes in their work.

Panelists:

Matthew Brandt, Artist
Mary Beth Heffernan, Artist, Associate Professor, Art History and Visual Arts, Occidental College
Sheila Pinkel, Professor Emerita, Art and Art History Program, Pomona College
Christopher Russell, Artist

Click here for more information on the talk.

Mark & Hilarie Moore have donated a major work by acclaimed L.A. artist Billy Al Bengston to The Honolulu Art Museum (HI) on behalf and in memory  of arts patron Henry Segerstrom, who passed away this year.

Founded in 1927, the Honolulu Museum of Art is Hawai‘i’s largest private presenter of visual arts programs, with an internationally recognized collection of more than 50,000 works spanning 5,000 years. In addition to the visual arts, film and concert programs, lectures, art classes and workshops make the museum the state’s cultural hub.

Enter a caption

Canopus Dracula, 1977 / Acrylic on canvas / 48 x 44 inches

The gallery is thrilled to announce the acquisition of “Tattoo Flash”(2011) by Okay Mountain for the permanent collection of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX).

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, houses an encyclopedic collection of more than 65,000 works of art created throughout the world, from antiquity to the present. Works from the MFAH collections fill the galleries year-round with art embracing every era of history across the globe.

Okay Mountain is a nine member artist collective based in Austin, Texas. Formed in 2006 as an artist-run alternative gallery space, the group has exhibited their drawing, video, sound, and performance projects throughout the United States and in Mexico City, and has been widely recognized for its “inventive construction, loving attention to detail and keen-eyed connoisseurship.” Okay Mountain repackages, reconstitutes, and rekindles our consumerist desires with a sardonic edge. Their installations and multi-media assemblage works mimic the stock vernacular of our communal materialism, yet tweak them just enough to reveal our superficial insecurities and convictions.

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

Congratulations to Penelope Umbrico, who’s solo show at Bruce Silverstein Gallery is an Art Forum critics’ pick.  Art critic Lori Cole reviews the show, which runs through February 20th.

Click here to read the review.

The gallery is pleased to announce the acquisition of David Maisel‘s major work, Lake Project 6 (2010) by Milwaukee Art Museum 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.

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.”

Gallery artist Ryan Wallace opens a solo show, “Dragnalus,” at Cooper Cole Gallery on January 22nd. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in Canada.

Taking its title from the post-hardcore band Unwound’s ode to apathy, boredom and the repetition of daily existence, Wallace’s work-a-day approach mines beauty from his utilitarian materials and dogged spacial investigations. Wallace’s output is a cycle of continuously constructed, razed, rebuilt and re-flattened information. Like a field of fossils, the floor of the gallery is an optical vista of tiles that both support and trap the materials employed in his paintings and sculptures.

Click here for more information on Dragnalus. 

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