Mark Moore Fine Art Blog

The gallery is proud to announce the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego‘s acquisition of “Lake Project #6” by David Maisel for its permanent collection.

Founded in 1941 as The Art Center in La Jolla, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) has evolved into an organization of national and international renown. The collection includes more than 4,000 works created since 1950, and reflects an artistic program that encourages promising emerging artists and recognizes mid-career artists whose work deserves more visibility. The Museum serves the region as a vital cultural and civic asset, with contemporary art and living artists at its core.

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.”

Maisel is the recipient of a 2011 grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, a 2008 Artist Residency from the Headlands Center for the Arts, and a 2007 Scholar/Artist Residency from the Getty Research Institute. Maisel has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Opsis Foundation. He was appointed a Trustee of the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2011. His work has been shown globally, including in such prestigious institutions as the California Museum of Photography (CA), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (AZ), Portland Art Museum (OR), Fotografie Forum International (Frankfurt), American Academy (Rome), Musee des Beaux Artes (Bordeaux), and Seoul Arts Center (Seoul) among many other venues. Maisel’s works are in major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), the Getty Museum (CA), the National Gallery of Art (D.C.), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), among many other institutions. He received his BA from Princeton University, studied at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and received his MFA from California College of the Arts. The artist lives and works in Sausalito (CA).

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

The gallery is very pleased to announce the Norton Museum of Art‘s acquisition of David Maisel‘s “Lake Project #2” for its permanent collection.

The Lake Project comprises images from Owens Lake, the site of a formerly 200 square-mile lake in California on the eastern side of the Sierra Mountains. Beginning in 1913, the Owens River was diverted into the Owens Valley Aqueduct, to bring water to Los Angeles. By 1926, the lake had been depleted, exposing vast mineral flats and transforming a fertile valley into an arid landscape. For decades, fierce winds have dislodged microscopic particles from the lakebed, creating carcinogenic dust storms. Indeed, the site has become the highest source of particulate matter pollution in the United States, emitting 300,000 tons annually of cadmium, chromium, arsenic and other materials. The concentration of minerals in the remaining water yields blooms of microscopic bacteria, turning the liquid a deep, bloody red. The lake has become the locus of water’s absence, a negation of itself, a void. The images serve, in a sense, as the lake’s autopsy. Viewed from the air, vestiges of the lake appear as a river of blood, a microchip, a bisected vein, or a galaxy’s map. It is this contemporary version of the sublime that Maisel finds find compelling– a strange beauty born of environmental degradation.

The Norton Museum of Art was founded in 1941 by Ralph Hubbard Norton (1875–1953) and his wife, Elizabeth Calhoun Norton (1881–1947). The Nortons were actively interested in fine arts and developed a sizable collection of paintings and sculpture. The Museum Collection consists of 7,000+ works of art concentrated in the following departments: European, American, Chinese, Contemporary and Photography.   

Maisel is the recipient of a 2011 grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, a 2008 Artist Residency from the Headlands Center for the Arts, and a 2007 Scholar/Artist Residency from the Getty Research Institute. Maisel has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Opsis Foundation. He was appointed a Trustee of the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2011. His work has been shown globally, including in such prestigious institutions as the California Museum of Photography (CA), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (AZ), Portland Art Museum (OR), Fotografie Forum International (Frankfurt), American Academy (Rome), Musee des Beaux Artes (Bordeaux), and Seoul Arts Center (Seoul) among many other venues. Maisel’s works are in major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), the Getty Museum (CA), the National Gallery of Art (D.C.), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), among many other institutions. He received his BA from Princeton University, studied at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and received his MFA from California College of the Arts. The artist lives and works in Sausalito (CA).

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

The gallery is pleased to share David Maisel‘s inclusion in “The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Opening on May 3, the exhibition will also feature Sophie Calle, Chuck Close, Linda Connor, Moyra Davey,Binh Danh, Adam Fuss, Idris Khan, Vera Lutter, Carrie Mae Weems, Sally Mann, Andrew Moore, Chris McCaw, and others.

The exhibition explores the complexity of the medium’s relationship to time, memory, and history. Seventy-six works by 26 international artists will be presented at the Gallery for the first time. “The Memory of Time” is one of three stellar exhibitions that will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the National Gallery of Art’s photography program.

Concurrently on view through May 3 at Mark Moore Gallery is the artist’s most recent body of work, “The Fall.”

Maisel was commissioned to photograph the city of Toledo, Spain, for ToledoContemporánea, an exhibition created to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the death of the painter El Greco. “The Fall” is Maisel’s personal response to the landscape between Toledo and Madrid, in which he reveals topographies that have been aesthetically deranged and environmentally impacted by industrial use. From abandoned construction sites in Vicalvaro, ashen extraction zones in Borox, and crosshatched fields in Fuensalida, Maisel constructs a hallucinatory and alien worldview. Speaking to this, the artist says, “The baser the terrain, the more susceptible it is to contemplation, and the more complex it becomes as subject matter; I consider my pictures not as simply documents of these blighted regions, but as poetic renderings that reflect the human psyche that made them.” Maisel’s painterly abstractions in The Fall reference a variety of sources, from the landscapes of Richard Diebenkorn to the lunar renderings of NASA.

Maisel’s work has been exhibited globally, including such institutions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); International Center of Photography (NY); Palais de Tokyo (Paris); Fotografie Forum International (Frankfurt); American Academy (Rome); Musée des Beaux Artes (Bordeaux); and Seoul Arts Center (Seoul) among many other venues. Maisel’s works are in major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), the Getty Museum (CA), the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), and many others. He received his BA from Princeton University, studied at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and received his MFA from California College of the Arts. Maisel is the recipient of a 2011 grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, a 2008 Artist Residency from the Headlands Center for the Arts, and a 2007 Scholar/Artist Residency from the Getty Research Institute. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Center for Cultural Innovation. He was appointed a Trustee of the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2011. The artist lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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

The gallery is pleased to announce Penelope Umbrico‘s upcoming solo project at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT), “Shallow Sun,” which opens on Sunday, May 3, 2015, and will remain on view through October 25, 2015.

The project is part of the museum’s grand-scale semester theme, “Circumstance.” Curated by Richard Klein,  the museum will highlight inspiration and its influence across object-making, through the specifically commissioned work of six multi-generational artists, including Umbrico. Says Klein:

The exhibition will underscore the intersection of installation art and exhibition design, and show how the convergence of fine art, design, and non-art objects within the exhibition format informs and elucidates creative expression. For six months, the entire museum facility—whose distinctive galleries range from the intimate to the spacious—will be transformed into “rooms” designed by the exhibiting artists, which will “read” as total works of art as they show their own work alongside objects and/or artworks by other artists they have selected. In some instances, works may extend outside of the Museum’s walls, providing alternative ways of perceiving space by offering extended lines of sight across the campus. In doing so, “Circumstance” attempts to explore the interstices where art and object come together, come apart, and reunify, by examining context, its many shifts and permutations, and tracing the movement of art and objects from the studio to the museum.

Umbrico’s dedicated gallery show within the museum, titled “Shallow Sun,” places her practice in the continuum of the evolving history of photographic imagery. The Museum’s camera obscura will become a starting point to explore the technologies of both analog and digital reproduction and how we are at a point where light—traditionally the most central element of photography—has become disembodied from the natural world, experienced solely through the screen via digital algorithms that replicate our nostalgia for it. 

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

Interdisciplinary gallery artist Kim Rugg will have work included in “Rock, Paper, Scissors: Drawn from the JoAnn Gonzalez Hickey Collection” at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PA), opening on May 15th. The exhibition will remain on view through November 1, 2015, and grapples mostly with modern ideas pertaining to the practice of drawing. Says the institution:

What is drawing? While seemingly straightforward, the potential answers to this question are innumerable and complex. Some may see drawing as practice for a larger work in another medium; a system of note taking; a substitute for the camera; an act vital to artistic, spiritual, or intellectual growth; the primary focus of art; a method for experiment and risk; not confined to two dimensions; an extension of the body; everything.

Drawing is essential in the contemporary art world. The number of artists who identify primarily as practitioners of drawing is great; many artists move between drawing and other previously privileged practices without making hierarchical distinctions. The number of forms drawing can take is extraordinary and surprising; artists regularly expand the vocabulary for art through drawing.

“Rock, Paper, Scissors” features selections from the JoAnn Gonzalez Hickey collection made by students in PAFA’s Fall 2014 Advanced Drawing seminar led by PAFA’s Senior Curator, Robert Cozzolino and artist/faculty member Astrid Bowlby. As the course progressed, the students brought their studio experience, class discussions, and experience with original artwork and the broader art world to shape the exhibition.  Students established a relationship with Hickey and explored her collection, an invitation made possible through her SYZYGY curatorial platform for study.  The result is an unusual curatorial project full of discovery.

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

Mark Moore Gallery is proud to announce the Albright-Knox Art Gallery‘s acquisition of “Idyllwild” (2011) by Allison Schulnik for its permanent collection, as well as an edition copy of the artist’s 2011 video, “Mound.”

Founded officially in December 1862, The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy—the governing body of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery—is among the country’s oldest public arts institutions in the United States. Since its inception as The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, the museum has been dedicated to acquiring, exhibiting, and preserving modern and contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on the collection, presentation, and interpretation of the artistic expressions of our times. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s 150-year tradition of collecting, conserving, and exhibiting the art of its time has given rise to one of the world’s most extraordinary art collections. Thomas Hoving, art historian and former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, said that “the Albright-Knox Art Gallery should be on everyone’s list to see, for it’s an overwhelming art experience. Small, intimate, and seductive, the museum has one of the most thumping modern and contemporary collections in the world.”

Allison Schulnik choreographs her subjects in compositions that embody a spirit of the macabre, a Shakespearian comedy/tragedy of love, death and farce. The subjects often stare back at the audience and study them as they are in turn studied, aware of their ancestors from the Grand Theme works of the past, the genre paintings that inform them. Although a haunting sense of foreboding, discomfort and unease is palpable, a sense of understanding, compassion and hopefulness for her cast of characters is still evident in the heavy impasto paintings. Her sculptural use of oil paint references her clay-animation background, as a motion-like sensibility affords her paintings unparalleled depth and energy.

Born in 1978 (San Diego, CA), Schulnik earned her BFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (CA). She has had solo exhibitions at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OK), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Rokeby Gallery (London), Unosunove Arte Contemporanea (Rome), Division Gallery (Montreal), and ZieherSmith Gallery (NY), in addition to her inclusion in film festivals around the world. Her work has also been shown at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture (Moscow), Hammer Museum (CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Santa Barbara Museum of Art (CA), Contemporary Arts Museum (LA), and Hangar-7 (Salzburg), among many others. Allison Schulnik’s work is in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), Santa Barbara Art Museum (CA), Museé de Beaux Arts (Montreal), Farnsworth Art Museum (ME), Laguna Art Museum (CA), Montreal Contemporary Art Museum (Canada), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (CT), and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Canada). The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

The gallery is very proud to share Shaun Gladwell‘s cover and feature story for the April issue of ArtNews. Featuring an image from his 2009-10 “Double Field” photography, performance, and video series – which was derived from his travels to Afghanistan and the Middle East with the Australian Defence Force – the magazine cover connects to a story titled “Art Made in Harm’s Way.” Says writer Lilly Wei:

Gladwell, who lives between Sydney and London, is known for his physically strenuous work. He represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2009 and was chosen to be Australia’s official war artist that same year. He went to Afghanistan and the Middle East with the Australian Defence Force in 2009, and a book about his time there by Kit Messham-Muir is soon to be released. Gladwell said that he has always been anti-war and left-leaning, having chosen art school partly in reaction to his family’s tradition of military service. Nonetheless, he remains sympathetic toward his father, who served in Vietnam and whom he admired. Gladwell shared with his father and brothers a love of physical risk and intense sports, playing a kind of Russian roulette to see if he could sidestep death or severe injury.

When he went to Afghanistan and the Middle East, Gladwell wanted to analyze the war experience from a less dramatic perspective, using a less expected language, one that was empathetic but critical. He said it was hard to anticipate what happens in a war zone—the amount of down time, waiting time, as well as the traveling, and more waiting—echoing Biggs about the crippling boredom. “These were schizophrenic environments,” he said, “where some people welcomed your presence, others tolerated you, and others tried to kill you. But it was the tension of waiting that was my experience of war, waiting for the IED to go off or the threat of indirect fire. ”

To read the full article documenting Gladwell’s incredible and harrowing experience, click HERE.

Concurrently, Gladwell is also the subject of a number of positive reviews and features from ArtInfo (as well as several other publications) for his current two-part exhibition at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (AUS). On view through April 25, 2015, “‘The Lacrima Chair’ (SCAF Project 24) at SCAF is an immersive installation comprising sculpture and video. It ‘engages the poetics of flight, travel, and cultural transmission, specifically French cultural influences within Australia and vice versa,’ according to SCAF. Visitors enter the exhibition through a mist screen and can even choose to enhance their experience of the installation by getting into costume and sitting in an airplane chair under a shower of water.” – ArtInfo

Says the publication:

Sydney-born, London-based video artist Shaun Gladwell is one of Australia’s most important and successful contemporary artists. Since he emerged onto the international scene in 2000, Gladwell has exhibited throughout Australia and around the globe, cementing his status as one of the world’s most innovative video artists. He represented Australia at the 53rd Venice Biennale and travelled to Afghanistan as the official Australian War Artist in 2009.

Sydney’s Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) has brought Gladwell back to Sydney for a major project across two sites that reveals the breadth and scope of Gladwell’s creativity and ingenuity. SCAF features “The Lacrima Chair” a major new commission by Gladwell, and the UNSW galleries is the site of “Collection+: Shaun Gladwell”, a survey of Gladwell’s career and practice featuring more than 20 works that have been drawn from public and private collections worldwide.

We congratulate Shaun on these significant milestones! For more information about the artist or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

The gallery is thrilled to announce the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art‘s acquisition of Jean Shin‘s photograph, “Domesticated Landscapes (Bark)” (2014) for its permanent collection.

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art was founded in 1842 by Daniel Wadsworth, one of the first major American art patrons. The museum’s collections of nearly 50,000 works of art span 5,000 years and feature the Morgan collection of Greek and Roman antiquities and European decorative arts; world-renowned baroque and surrealist paintings; an unsurpassed collection of Hudson River School landscapes; European and American Impressionist paintings; modernist masterpieces; the Serge Lifar collection of Ballets Russes drawings and costumes; the George A. Gay collection of prints; the Wallace Nutting collection of American colonial furniture and decorative arts; the Samuel Colt firearms collection; costumes and textiles; African American art and artifacts; and contemporary art. In 2008, Susan L. Talbott, previously director of Smithsonian Arts at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, became the Atheneum’s 10th director. During her tenure she developed new programs and exhibitions that were both engaging and intellectually exciting, expanded the collections through significant acquisitions, particularly in modern and contemporary art, and created partnerships and collaborative projects with a broad range of community groups in order to make the museum even more inclusive and welcoming.

Jean 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.

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.

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. She lives and works in New York City.

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

Mark Moore Gallery is proud to announce its exclusive United States representation of Israeli sculpture artist, Zemer Peled. The artist will have her first solo show with the gallery in September of 2016.

Peled’s work examines the beauty and brutality of the natural world. Her sculptural language is formed by her surrounding landscapes and nature, and engages with themes of memories, identity, and place. Her sculptures and installations consist of thousands of hand-crafted porcelain shards; a technique that yields a texture both delicate and severe. In some works, large scale-like ceramic pieces appear airy, delicate, and fluffy, as if one’s breath might break it. In others, Peled’s fragments are geometric barbs that mysteriously take on an alluring form – offering a sense of softness despite a sharp actuality. She has recently been featured in Hi-Fructose Magazine, Colossal, National Public Radio, MIND Magazine, O Magazine, and Ceramics Monthly (which featured her on the cover of the May 2015 issue).

Peled (b. 1983) was born and raised in a Kibbutz in the northern part of Israel. After completing her BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (Jerusalem), she earned her MA at the Royal College of Art (UK). In recent years, her work has been exhibited internationally, including such venues as Sotheby’s and Saatchi Gallery (London), Eretz Israel Museum (Tel Aviv), the Henry Moore Gallery at the Royal College of Art (London), and the Orangerie du Senate (Paris), among others. The artist currently lives and works at the Archie Bray Foundation Residency (Helena, MT).

The gallery is looking to hire a part-time employee for the position of “Registrar.” This position requires that the employee be present in the gallery Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays (11am-6pm), and during selected opening receptions – as guided by the Director. A full job description is below:

GENERAL TASKS:

• Update gallery contacts/mailing lists as required by supervising staff
• Occasionally write blog/Artsy posts as asked by supervising staff
• Update, replace, and re-format artist bios on server and website as needed
• Format and archive new press articles and links, place on server and website
• Update artist pages on website accordingly with new press, collections acquisitions, or exhibitions/images
• Maintain and update Artsy, Artnet inventory online
• Assist with wrapping, packing, and organizing physical artwork inventory
• Writing press releases for upcoming exhibitions
• Assist with general exhibition/art fair preparation and logistics

REQUIRED SKILLS:

• Excellent verbal and written communication
• Graphic Design experience: preferably Photoshop and InDesign
• Ability to self-manage deadlines, routine inventory checks, etc.

BENEFICIAL SKILLS:

• Familiarity with ArtBase, Artsy inventory systems, and WordPress

Compensation follows the guidelines for part time hourly employees, and is managed/logged by the employee under the supervision of the Director. Opportunities to assist with client relations and sales will be made available based on performance. No benefits shall apply to this position.

Interested candidates may send resumes to: INFO@MARKMOOREGALLERY.COM (Subject: “Registrar Position.”)

No phone calls, please.