Mark Moore Fine Art Blog

The gallery is pleased to announce Ali Smith‘s inclusion in “HERE NOW: Six Works by Six LA Artists” at Wilding Cran Gallery (CA). Also including works by Kristin Calabrese, Noah Davis, Ian Pines, Fran Siegel, and Etienne Zack, the exhibition will open on Saturday, March 21, and run through May 2, 2015.

Smith uses the canvas as an open space of exploration; an empty landscape that serves as the starting point for investigation into abstract terrains.  Smith weaves together fleeting thoughts, moments of time, the fine lines between fact and fiction and subjective desires within her canvases, which in turn present the hopeful attitude of the artist, in the face of the realities of life and experience. Smith received her MFA from California State University, Long Beach (CA), and has since had solo exhibitions in New York, Houston and Los Angeles. She has been included in numerous group shows, including those at the Laguna Art Museum, Irvine Fine Arts Center, Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock, and Riverside Museum. Her work is included in the collections of the Laguna Art Museum, Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, and Progressive. Smith is represented by Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City and Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, and was the recipient of the Hoff Award in 2011 and the City of Long Beach Artist Grant in 2008.

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

Gallery artist Penelope Umbrico was recently featured in WIRED Magazine for her new media-based photography.

Says writer Jakob Schiller:

Penelope Umbrico’s work is to classical photography as hip hop is to soul, blues and jazz music: a giant remix.

It starts with her using an iPhone to take photos of classic images of mountains shot by the likes of Henry Cartier-Bresson and Edward Weston. Next, she chooses from the many photography apps on her iPhone and runs her photos through almost every filter. She’ll process her photos several hundred times. From 19 original photos, she’s created 6,000 images for Range.

The project and corresponding book is a technicolor mashup of old and new photography, harkening to the masters while having the punchy “pop” of Instagram. Umbrico chose to re-photograph mountains because they represent stability, while photography, she feels, is the opposite. New technology—like her iPhone and the apps she uses—has the genre in constant flux. “Photography is always changing, but I do think right now is a particularly amazing moment,” she says.

To read the full article, click here. Exemplary works from this series can be viewed by visiting Umbrico’s most recent exhibition page. For more information about the artist or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to announce its representation of interdisciplinary artist, Jean Shin.

Shin is nationally recognized for her monumental installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community. For each project, she amasses vast collections of a particular object—prescription pill bottles, sports trophies, sweaters—which are often sourced through donations from individuals in a participating community. These intimate objects then become the materials for her conceptually rich sculptures, videos and site-specific installations. Distinguished by her meticulous, labor-intensive process, and her engagement of community, Shin’s arresting installations reflect individuals’ personal lives as well as collective issues that we face as a society.

In her current exhibition at the gallery, “Domesticated Landscapes,” Shin investigates the history and cultural connotations of flatware. The practical, utilitarian function of the utensil serves as a cross-cultural common ground facilitating the basic human need for sustenance. Yet historically, flatware has become loaded with divisive cultural significance, evoking associations embedded with connotations of class, etiquette, and privilege. This complexity is similarly evident in her use of the tree as an object representing both utility and idealized beauty. In combination, the tree and flatware suggest a harmonious co-existence of culture and nature, while softly referencing their mutual fragility. A video interview with the artist focusing on this show may be viewed HERE.

Born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in the United States, Shin attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1999 and received a BFA and MS from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Her work has been widely exhibited in major national and international museums, including in solo exhibitions at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona (2010), Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC (2009), the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia (2006), and Projects at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2004). Other venues have been the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Art and Design, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Asia Society and Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Sculpture Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York City. Site-specific permanent installations have been commissioned by the US General Services Administration Art in Architecture Award, New York City’s Percent for the Arts and MTA Art for Transit. She has received numerous awards, including the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Architecture/Environmental Structures (2008) and Sculpture (2003), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Art Award. Her works have been featured in many publications, including Frieze Art, Flash Art, Tema Celeste, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Artnews, and The New York Times. She lives and works in New York City.

For more information about the exhibition artists, or available work, please feel free to email info@markmooregallery.com, and we will accommodate your needs.

New gallery artist Jean Shin now has work featured in the permanent collection of the Rose Art Museum (MA). The acquisition of Shin’s 2009 installation piece, “Alterations,” was part of a major donation of forty-one works by collector, computer programmer, and philanthropist Peter Norton. Says ArtForum:

Drawn from Norton’s personal collection, this gift is part of a series of donations to university art museums and teaching museums throughout the country, including the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore, Saratoga Springs, New York; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California; and the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

The gift to the Rose includes video, photography, painting, prints, sculpture, and mixed media works by artists such as Doug Aitken, Nicole Eisenman, Omer Fast, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Jean Shin, Kara Walker, and Christopher Wool, among others.

We congratulate Jean on this major milestone, and encourage you to visit the Rose Art Museum if you find yourself on the Brandeis University campus (on which the museum is housed). For more information about the artist or available work, please email info@markmooregallery.com

Recent works by gallery artists Josh Azzarella, Penelope Umbrico, and Stephanie Washburn are currently on view at Biola University‘s Earl and Virginia Green Art Gallery.

Says curator Jeff Rau:

“The Coded Image” features five artists wrestling with the increasing instability of images in the present information age. The distribution of electronic content inherently involves a destructive/reconstructive process that challenges the perceived stability and continuity that were early dinstinctives of photography. By employing a variety of innovative photographic, video, and new media techniques, these artists offer fresh perspectives on the heavily mediated and abstract nature of these information-images.

The exhibition will remain on view through March 26, 2015. For information about the featured artists or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

The gallery is pleased to announce that the Akron Art Museum recently acquired three prints by gallery artist Josh Azzarella for its permanent collection, including Untitled #13, Untitled #39, and Untitled #33.

The museum has continued to enrich the lives of those in Northeast Ohio and beyond through modern and contemporary art. Its nationally recognized collection of more than 5,000 objects was documented through the publication of collection catalogues. Three acquisitions endowments were created to ensure the collection’s future growth. A greatly enlarged general endowment provided increased, more stable funding, allowing the staff to undertake ambitious programs and exhibitions with national and even international impact. In 2007, its eighty-fifth year, the museum more than tripled in size with the opening of the new John S. and James L. Knight Building, which adjoins the 1899 building. Spanning three centuries, like the museum’s collection, together they symbolize the museum’s dual role as preserver of the past and herald of the future.

Josh Azzarella (b. 1978, Ohio) creates videos and photographs that explore the power of context in the authorship of memory, oftentimes utilizing seminal moments in pop culture and news media to create accessible confrontations with historiography. By illuminating the individual encounter with communal experiences, Azzarella evaluates the perception of realness – which can ultimately be rooted in both the fantastic as much as the pragmatic.

Azzarella was the recipient of the 2006 Emerging Artist Award and related solo exhibition from The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT). He has previously shown at the California Museum of Photography (CA), University Art Museum, Long Beach (CA), Vancouver Art Gallery (Canada), Kavi Gupta Gallery (IL), Academie der Kunste (Berlin), Sean Kelly Gallery (NY), Catharine Clark Gallery (CA), Mississippi State University (MS), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (CA) and DCKT Gallery (NY). His work is included in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PA), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (TX), the San Diego Museum of Modern Art (CA), the Margulies Collection (FL), Western Bridge (WA) and JP Morgan Chase (NY). He lives and works in Easton, PA.

We congratulate Josh on this incredible milestone. For more information about the artist or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

Gallery artist Ryan Wallace is included in the group exhibition, “Altered States,” which is currently on view at Galerie Jérôme Pauchant through April 4, 2015.

Says the gallery:

An approach that is both singular and collective brings together artists presented here. While visually very different, the exhibited works create a common language around the handling of the manufactured object and processing of organic materials. Their original use is diverted to disappear behind his own formal paradox desecration of art.
The intrusion of raw elements from the real (colored protective film for car glass, rubber bullets, palm leaves, inks cartridge printers or foil) joined this “perceptual approach to reality” dear to the New Realists, as well as the positioning of natural elements and “poor products” compositional elements in Arte Povera. This re-reading is part of a discourse of modernity and a language specific to the twenty-first century.

Also included in the exhibition are works by Graham Collins, Evan Robarts, January S. Hansen, and Niall McClelland.

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

Gallery artist Allison Schulnik has works featured in “Strange Plants II,” the second book in a series that celebrates plants in contemporary art. Produced by Zioxla, the book features the work of 30 artists, including Schulnik, and explores what these artists think about plants and how they portray them in their work.

Says the publisher:

It includes viscous paintings of drooping flower arrangements; intuitive photographs of lily pads and lithe bodies; mixed-media collages that juxtapose the tranquility of Japanese Ikebana with the chaotic energy of vandalism; and much more. Editor Zio Baritaux brought together several artists who take a unique approach to incorporating plants into their work: Allison Schulnik, Misha Hollenbach, Francesca DiMattio, Zin Taylor, Katarina Janeckova, Stills & Strokes and Ren Hang. Schulnik, for example, used her own garden as a character in one of her short films; Stills & Strokes projected colors and geometric shapes onto the leaves of plants in botanical gardens; and DiMattio filled the sculptures in her exhibition with dramatic and unruly flowers.

“The aim of Strange Plants II is to continue the compelling conversations about how we perceive and interpret both the bizarre and beautiful sides of art and nature,” editor Zio Baritaux says. “Since the release of the first book, a community of like-minded, inquisitive and creative people has grown up around these conversations, and I hope this community will expand with the publication of this book.”

Strange Plants II was designed by Folch Studio, an award-winning design house in Barcelona. The book is 148 pages in length, and comes with eight adhesives so that readers can select their three favorite images and create their own unique covers.”

The book was recently featured on Oyster Magazine, to positive acclaim. “Strange Plants II” is available for pre-order now, and begins to ship on March 9. Please allow 2-3 weeks for delivery.

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

Paintings by gallery artist Lester Monzon are currently on view at MAINSITE Contemporary (OK) in the group show, “Abstract Abstract.” Also featuring work by Josh Aster, Elise Dietrich, David Kelley, Chris Kuhn, Jacob Melchi, Ellen Moershel, Brad Stevens, Greta Svalberg, and Sungwon Yun, the show was curated by Tim Stark, and will remain on view through March 13, 2015. Says the gallery:

Abstraction is often thought of as the the movement that changed modernism through visually and physically breaking down the constructs of classical and early modernist art. It also responded to the rapidly developing world and changed the way in which people viewed and understood art and their surroundings. As a result, abstraction began to grow in popularity and size. Abstract paintings, not bound by the constraints typical of representational artwork, were only limited by the relative limitations of the paint and the surface being used. The trend of unbound abstraction, a perfect example of the modernist montra “art for art’s sake,” expanded throughout the duration of the modernist era and resulted in an almost fetishistic obsession with extra large scale works.
While most contemporary artists are no longer satisfied with making art simply for the sake of art, abstraction is still a major element in the contemporary art world. This is, in part, due to its inherent ability to directly respond to a constantly changing world and an ever more complicated human condition. In contemporary painting this focus on elements of culture as well as art history, medium, and surface has allowed abstraction to continue to evolve. One of the fantastic results of this evolution is abstraction’s return to the small scale painting.
Challenging by nature, small scale works offer the artists the ability to work quickly and decisively, while giving a focus on craft and detail that is rarely seen in extra large abstraction. They also give the viewer an intimate experience and a revealing look into the process and creation of the work. Abstract Abstract is an exhibition, displaying over 40 works by 11 artists from across the country, that serves to spotlight the breadth and depth of small scale abstraction in contemporary painting.

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

Tomorrow – Saturday, February 28, 2015, from  7-8:30pm – gallery artist David Maisel will give a lecture on his work at the Denver Art Museum. As part of the museum’s “Month of Photography” programming, the artist has been specially invited by the DAM Photography Department with support from the Cooke Daniels Fund and the Anderman Photography Lecture Series.

Says the museum:

David Maisel is notable for photographing the unseen and the unseeable. Both in his landscapes and in his recent work with objects, he entices the viewer through the use of abstraction and unreal color. 

Maisel’s photographs reveal a fascination with society’s mark on the terrain. He utilizes the aerial view to make clear the aesthetics of entropy by highlighting disjunctions between human and geologic time. Through framing, condensing space, and removing contextual references of foreground and background, he places emphasis on the forms and colors of water and earth that are the environmental consequence of industrializing nature.

While Maisel’s work is rooted in photography’s tradition of recording, the monumental scale and presentation of his prints also draw upon the language of abstract painting. Despite this visual correspondence, the work acts equally as a subversion of modernism as the inherent beauty of the often-horrific situations raises questions regarding the power of the sublime.
 
David Maisel was born in New York City in 1961 and lives and works in Sausalito, CA. A survey of his work, Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime, traveled to institutions including the CU Art Museum and University of New Mexico Art Museum in 2013-14. An associated monograph was released by Steidl in 2013.

Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $5 students with ID, $10 for DAM members and CPAC members, $15 general admission: https://tickets.denverartmuseum.org/selection.aspx?item=1208

Ticketed with member discount. Purchase tickets online or call 720-913-0130. For additional details, e-mail photography@denverartmuseum.org.

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