Mark Moore Fine Art Blog

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.

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.