Mark Moore Fine Art Blog

Gallery artist Christopher Russell is currently featured in “Lens Work: Celebrating LACMA’s Experimental Photography at 50,” a group exhibition on Level 3 of the Hammer Building. Says the museum:

Photography was founded on and developed as a result of experimentation: it is a technology-based practice rife with inherent uncertainties, despite its reputation for reliably documenting reality. This installation celebrates the curatorial drive informing over 50 years of collecting at LACMA, which embraces experimentation in photography.

From works by the medium’s earliest practitioners to those by contemporary artists, LACMA’s collection is rich in innovative examples of what is often referred to as “the magic of photography.” As lenses evolve and choices of final output increase, photographic practice will no doubt continue to inspire new ways of perceiving, seeing, and believing.

The gallery congratulates Christopher on his inclusion in this exhibition, as well as the museum’s permanent collection. “Lens Work” remains on view through July 4, 2015.

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

The gallery is proud to share Jean Shin‘s current solo exhibition – “Inclusions” – at the Crow Collection (Dallas, TX), which will be on view concurrently with the Dallas Art Fair – in which the gallery will be included (Booth G14), and featuring new works by the artist.

In tandem with the exhibition, the museum also produced an artist talk with Shin, and featured new works in the Sculpture Garden, entitled “Celadon Landscape.” “Inclusions” will remain on view through October 18, 2015.

For more information about the artist, available works, or works to be featured in the Dallas Art Fair booth, please email info@markmooregallery.com

In celebration of the Blanton Museum of Art‘s recent acquisition of “Roadside Attractions” (2012) by artist collective Okay Mountain,  the museum is allowing for the 9 artists to take over many aspects of the museum for nearly a month.

Starting with a special mural commission on the “Frank Public Art Wall” (4th Street and Colorado in downtown Austin), the collective’s takeover will showcase their interest in public art incentives. Titled “All Things are Possible” (2015), the mural demonstrates Okay Mountain’s interest in tongue-in-cheek pop culture, while also facilitating a dialogue about art outside of the traditional museum or gallery space. There will be an opening reception for the mural (which was completed on March 30th) at Frank on April 15 from 6-9pm. Concurrently, “Roadside Attractions” will be on view at the museum.

On Saturday, April 4 at 2pm, the collective will participate in an artist talk titled “Perspectives: Okay Mountain,” which will focus on their role in the contemporary art scene in Austin (TX). Says Glasstire Magazine:

The Blanton will host a lecture with all nine current members of Okay Mountain. Formed in 2006 and based in Austin, the members are scattered around a number of cities. This lecture will mark the first time that the entire group has ever spoken together in Austin.

Access to the talk is included with museum admission; Free for members and UT students, faculty, and staff. For more information about the artists or available work, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

The gallery is proud to share Kiel Johnson‘s inclusion in “In Good Company,” a group exhibition opening at Sherry Leedy Contemporary (Kansas City) tonight (April 3, 2015) from 7-9pm.

Also including work by Jane Booth, Mark Cowardin, Amir H. Fallah, Damon Freed, Bill Hassell, Tom Huck, Anne Austin Pearce, Kent Michael Smith, Mary Ann Strandell, Caleb Taylor, and Larry Thomas, the exhibition remains on view through May 21, 2015. Says the gallery:

“2015 marks the 30th year anniversary of Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art. Over that time the gallery has been privileged to work with amazing artists and generous collectors in our community and throughout the country. We have always been in good company and that experience is the core of this exhibition, ‘In Good Company.'”

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 “Mirrors (from Home Décor Catalogs and Websites)” (2001-11) by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. As part of the museum’s permanent collection, the work is currently featured in part of an ongoing series entitled “A History of Photography: Selections from the Museum’s Collection.” This exhibition is located on the ground floor of the museum, and will be on view through July 19, 2015.

Penelope Umbrico (born in Philadelphia, 1957) graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, and received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. She has participated extensively in solo and group exhibitions, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. Umbrico is core faculty in the School of Visual Arts MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media Program. Selected public collections include the Guggenheim Museum (NY), International Center of Photography (NY), McNay Museum of Art (TX), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Museum of Contemporary Photography (IL), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), Museum of Modern Art (NY), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), among others. She lives in New York City.

We congratulate Penelope on this milestone! For more information about the artist or available work, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

Allison Schulnik‘s most recent video, “Eager” (2014), will be featured in the upcoming Image Forum Film Festival (Japan). In association with the Yokohama Museum, Fukuoka City Public Library, and Aichi Arts Center (co-organizers), the festival will take place from April 26 to June 21st, 2015.

As the largest film festival in Japan, Image Forum will screen new and ambitious experimental films from in Japan and overseas. Subsequently, its programming will tour five cities throughout the country, including Tokyo, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Nagoya, and Yokohama.

We congratulate Allison on this exciting distinction! For more information about the artist or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

Mark Moore Gallery is proud to present “The Fall,” a recent series of large-scale color photographs by California–based artist David Maisel. For over two decades, Maisel has rigorously photographed aerial perspectives of landscapes affected by industry, agriculture, urban sprawl and other forms of human intervention. Despite the political underpinnings of these images, Maisel’s work refuses didactic interpretation, arriving instead at a surreal and abstracted intersection of beauty, mystery, and horror that the artist has referred to as the “apocalyptic sublime.”

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.

Concurrently in Gallery Two, is Stephanie Washburn‘s exhibition, “The Yielding.” Says the artist:

The exhibition includes drawing, photography and a video installation. It is an interpretation of the landscape genre, here at the ghost end of Romanticism. The images counter a pictorial vanishing point with the intimate entropy of a horizontal plane. Rather than objectifying as other and thereby historicizing “Nature,” they entangle mythic with mundane, a sublime of limits.

In the series Portraits, the skyscape overhead is overlaid with a charcoal rubbing of the ground beneath. The diptych Fire at Sea, a reference to Turner, captures a flat screen laid face up on the ground, ablaze in a spectacle of wreck and fire and sprayed with a hose. Idaho presents a still shot of the open desert. The eponymous Idaho potato rolls across the horizon line and screen in that same flatbed orientation. The potato exits and re-emerges in time with an implicit loop around the gallery. The work conflates the landscape genre with portrait, media spectacle, and institutional architecture in turn. We inhabit the very environmental crisis we fail to see. -Stephanie Washburn

Stephanie Washburn received her BA from Wesleyan University and her MFA from the UC Santa Barbara. Recent exhibitions include Fellows for Contemporary Art (CA), Davidson Art Center (CT) and ACME Gallery (CA). Her work has been reviewed in The Los Angeles Times, New American Paintings and Huffington Post. It has been acquired by Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA) and Sweeney Art Gallery at UC Riverside (CA). Washburn lives in Ojai, CA and is a Lecturer at UCSB.

For more information about the artists or images of available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com. Both exhibitions open tonight, March 26, 7-9pm, and remain on view through May 2, 2015.

Gallery artist Christopher Russell will open a two-person exhibition of new work at the Harris Gallery (University of La Verne, CA) on April 2, 2015. On view through May 15, “Scientific Magic” will also feature work by mixed-media artist Sarah Cromarty. Says curator Dion Johnson:

‘Scientific Magic’ juxtaposes sculptural paintings by Sarah Cromarty with photographic works by Christopher Russell. This exhibition encourages viewers to wonder beyond their first impressions and discover idiosyncratic imagery and narrative oddities. Linked by complex and sometimes counterintuitive studio practices, Cromarty and Russell create art objects that conjure surprises and chart new visual territories. 

 In ‘The Falls’ series, Christopher Russell’s razor-scratched photo works skillfully integrate photography and drawing to create distinctly mysterious pictures. Most of his pieces are symmetrically structured diptychs or triptychs with pulsating veils of bold monochromatic translucency. Frosty silvers, aquatic blues and glowing golds illuminate ambiguous landscape-like spaces. White razor-scratched lines are superimposed atop these saturated photographic fields. The scratched line technique violates the photo print surface and the resulting imagery seems to both fracture and unite the color space.

Gazing into Russell’s carefully orchestrated scenarios, viewers are invited to explore gossamer precise drawings that flow through his compositions: floral patterns interlace and transition; texts appear and terminate; ship masts connect and cluster. Whether alluding to Victorian interior décor or ships lost at sea, Russell’s fragmented narratives seem to hover between haunted memories and daydreamt hallucinations.

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

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.