Mark Moore Fine Art Blog

Gallery artist Jean Shin has a solo show, Surface Tension, opening at Cristin Tierny Gallery on February 25th.

Shin is nationally recognized for her monumental installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community. In Surface Tension, she investigates the divide between public and private in urban spaces by using a material very familiar to New York City residents: the plywood walls surrounding construction sites.

At first glance, the exhibition seems comprised of a series of monolithic paintings on panel, each featuring an abstract composition modeled in subtly varied tones of blue. The panels’ beauty, however, belies their distinctive origins: they previously served as construction fencing, and their compositions are products of chance that document a dialogue between two opposing forces at work. With surfaces that have been continually painted over after every new appearance of graffiti, paper posts, and other marks, the “paintings” in Surface Tension are, in fact, found objects chronicling past erasures.

The results of this contested partnership between public expressions like graffiti and their subsequent redaction allude to the deep history of negotiating urban space. City residents, living in constantly changing environments, know this negotiation well. Construction fences abound in neighborhoods and line commutes, intervening in daily activity. Displaying these “collective paintings” in the gallery, the artist calls attention to what is often overlooked, revealing in the painted gestures the unintended byproducts of urban transformation with all of its inherent engagement and struggle.

Jean Shin attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received a BFA and MS from Pratt Institute. Her work has been widely exhibited worldwide including solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, The Montclair Art Museum, and the Crow Collection of Asian Art. Her works have been featured and commissioned in over 150 exhibitions in major museums and cultural institutions such as: The New Museum of Contemporary Art; The Brooklyn Museum; The Queens Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Asia Society; SculptureCenter; and The Museum of Arts and Design.

Shin has received numerous awards, including the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Architecture/Environmental Structures and Sculpture, Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Art award. Shin’s many notable public art commissions include the General Services Administration, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and more. Her work is held in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Rose Art Museum, The Honolulu Museum of Art, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Boise Art Museum, and The Fabric Workshop and Museum. In 2016, Jean Shin will complete a major commission for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York at the 63rd Street Station on the new Second Avenue Subway line. In March, she will begin a residency at Material for the Arts in Long Island City. Shin lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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

Penelope Umbrico is giving a talk this evening on photography in the digital age at the Harry Ransom Center.

Penelope Umbrico is known for her photographic works exploring the relationship between modern technology and professional photography, the widespread availability and consumption of internet images, and for repurposing images from catalogs and websites like Flickr to reflect the fluidity and mutability of photography in the digital age.

Umbrico will discuss her use of photo-sharing and consumer websites as an expansive archive as she navigates between producer and consumer. Her work is featured in the current exhibition.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 7 P.M. AT THE RANSOM CENTER

Click here for more information.

Gallery artist Kim Rugg is part of Demarcate: Territorial Shift in Personal and Societal Mapping, a group show opening February 29th at San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (CA).

The exhibition brings together 14 artists whose work reflects the awareness of geographical territories and boundaries.

The artists in Demarcate are inspired by cartographic imagery as a formal starting point. From there, each artist takes a different conceptual route, examining themes such as urbanization, the natural environment, the utopia of a unified world where borders are eradicated, and identity as it relates to emotional, social, and political needs to connect with a place.

Individually, the works emphasize the human need to draw geographic lines and to locate oneself in the world. Collectively, they highlight how maps, beyond their pragmatic aspect, tell stories of relationships between a region and an individual or groups of individuals. Serving as visual narratives, the works in Demarcate offer a wider contemplation on how the marking of territory might connect to contemporary issues surrounding gentrification, globalization, nationalism, and war.

Click here for more information about the exhibition.

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

A new article in Widewalls highlights Jason Salavon‘s upcoming show at the gallery.

“Analyzing the vast field of digital data, American contemporary artist Jason Salavon contributes to the exploration of modern culture, obsessions and mannerisms through the display of his latest work. Presenting 14 new pieces based on computer processing, which can lead to some amazing art pieces, the solo exhibition in the Mark Moore Gallery by Jason Salavon titled All The Ways opens in February.”

Read the article here.

Gallery artist Julie Oppermann is the current focus of our Featured Works section of the website. Oppermann’s work pushes the limits of visual perception, making paintings that are physically difficult to perceive. The scintillating effects arising through the calculated layering and juxtaposition of contrasting colors through repetitive line patterns elicit shuttering afterimages, optical flicker, and disorienting sensations of movement. The paintings, on one hand, reference the digital, looking as if they might be computer-generated, vector-based interference patterns; up close, however, they reveal a gestural, intuitive approach.

Glitches, bleeds and mis-registrations rupture the illusory field of the moiré, creating visual noise and also highlight the basic tools at work: taped-off line patterns and paint on canvas. Where others approach ideas such as rasterization, pixelation, image compression, data loss and corruption primarily through the more obvious channel of digital media, Oppermann succeeds, instead, by effecting these phenomena directly through the medium of perception itself. The glitch, so to speak, occurs in the viewing of the work, by distorting the viewer’s field of vision, and interfering with their ability to “see” and look at the painting.

Julie Oppermann is an artist from New York who lives and works in Berlin. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union, and a Master’s in Neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012 she completed a residency at FAAP in São Paulo, an academic exchange with Professor Robert Lucander at the Berlin University of the Arts, and completed her M.F.A. at Hunter College. In 2013 she had solo exhibitions at Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles, and Galeria Árnes y Roepke in Madrid. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (TX), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA).

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

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.