Mark Moore Fine Art Blog

Gallery artist Penelope Umbrico will be signing her two newest books in Paris this week. Starting with her collaboration with RVB Books, the artist will debut and celebrate “Out of Order.” This book brings together a series of images collected by the artist on sales websites. All along the 2008-2013 financial crisis, she identified large online stocks of second-hand office furniture – including potted plants – from failed businesses. She took hold of this material to elaborate an episodic book, composing a portrait of the crisis, both visually and metaphorically that compounds a collection of images, a 4×6 glossy C-print, the list of bank failures between 2008 and 2013, and an essay by Clément Chéroux. The reception for this launch will take place Friday, November 14th, 6-10:30pm at the RVB Books Gallery (Paris). The concurrent exhibition will remain on view through December 20, 2014.

Umbrico will also release and sign her newest publication with the Aperture Foundation, “Range.” Utilizing the imagery from her most recent solo exhibition with Mark Moore Gallery, “Range” is an exploration of an analog history of photography within the digital torrent that is its current technological manifestation. She chose the subject of the mountain as represented within Aperture’s Masters of Photography series, in order to contrast these two most singular and stable subjects (the master and the mountain) with the instability and ubiquity of current photographic practices. To this end, Umbrico downloaded the most popular smart-phone camera apps to her iPhone and used them to re-photograph the images of mountains in these books, as well as representations of mountains from other canonical photographs in books and online. Umbrico will release and sign this book at Paris Photo on Saturday, November 15, at 5:30pm. This book will be available to the public in Spring, 2015.

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

The gallery is proud to announce its selection by The Culture Trip as one of Los Angeles’ “Top 10 Galleries for Contemporary Art.” Alongside peer galleries such as ACME, Honor Fraser Gallery, Kohn Gallery, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, M+B, Artspace Warehouse, New Image Art, LA Louver, and Various Small Fires, the gallery was chosen by critic Helen Armitage as a “cutting edge art space.” Says the writer:

“Established in 1984 by its principal and namesake, Mark Moore Gallery is a family-owned contemporary art venue located in charming Culver City that specialises in the representation of promising, up-and-coming and mid-career artists. Over the years, the gallery has been involved in several public art projects, some of which can be seen on the streets of Los Angeles, like Andrew Schoultz’s mural Imperials in downtown L.A., while forthcoming exhibitions at the gallery will feature Kris Kuski’s Antiquity in the Faux, a series of intricately constructed mixed media sculptures, and works by interdisciplinary artist Preston Daniels.”

We thank The Culture Trip and Helen Armitage for their support, and encourage you to visit our last concurrent solo exhibitions of 2014, Kris Kuksi’s “Antiquity in the Faux,” and Preston Daniels’ “Over Under,” on view November 15 – December 20, 2014.

The gallery is looking to hire a part-time Preparator. Please send current resumes to catlin@markmooregallery.com. A full description of the position, and its required skills/needs is below:

Preparator • Position Overview (Part Time)

Must be physically present in the gallery Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturdays, 11am-6pm (or possibly 8pm, as required by opening reception hours once every 4-5 weeks). Position is contingent on full week availability from December 2-7, 2014, while senior staff attends Miami Art Fairs.

REQUIRED SKILLS:

• Knowledge of proper wrapping, packing, and handling fine artwork.
• Ability to assist with exhibition installations, including hanging work, painting walls, and managing deliveries.
• Familiarity with obtaining shipping estimates and quotes from art handlers, FedEx, UPS, and specialty couriers.
• Decent working knowledge of Photoshop and/or InDesign to help archive press, edit images, or create printed gallery content.
• Strong interpersonal skills when answering phones, working on a team, or collaborating with an artist during an installation.
• Excellent organizational skills, which would apply to management of physical inventory, ArtBase inventory system, and online sales platforms like Artsy.
• Ability to self-manage deadlines.

BENEFICIAL SKILLS:

• Decent writing abilities.
• Previous knowledge of gallery programs, such as ArtBase, Artsy, WordPress, and Exhibit-E website platforms.
• Familiarity with installation/inventory photography.

Compensation follows the California guidelines for part time employees. Employee is responsible for logging hours worked, under the supervision of the Director. Rate of pay is hourly, and subject to negotiation based on employee experience and gallery abilities. No benefits shall apply to this position, though the position is open to incentives based on performance and gallery staffing needs. Additional hours may be available each week based on exhibition schedules and art fairs.

Gallery artist Julie Heffernan will open a solo exhibition of new paintings at Galerie Michael Haas (Berlin) on November 21, 2014, from 7-9pm. Says the gallery:

“Julie Heffernan’s paintings are so complex, both stylistically and in terms of content, that they continually surprise us. They are simultaneously portraits, still lifes and history paintings. Heffernan depicts in her paintings alternative habitats where human beings, often as personifications of herself, seek refuge from the catastrophic consequences of environmental damage, social ills, financial and political decisions or the global economy. The subject of the motives can never be comprehended with a short, superficial glance. Only upon detailed observation does the potential of Heffernan’s fantastic surrealism reveal itself.”

The exhibition will remain on view through December 20, 2014. For more information about the artist or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

Gallery artists Joshua Dildine and Penelope Umbrico will have work featured in “Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed,” an exhibition of photo-based art at the  University Galleries in Florida Atlantic University’s Dorothy F.
Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. The first half of the exhibition will open in the Schmidt Center Gallery on Thursday, Nov. 20, and the second half will open in the Ritter Art Gallery on Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2015. Both galleries are located on the Boca Raton campus.

Says the university:

‘“Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed’ presents works by more than 20 contemporary artists. Most of the artists live and work throughout the United States while a few reside in other countries including Israel, Denmark and Peru. While hardly unified in style and content, the artists’ works in “Altarations” blend photographic images and processes to produce works that celebrate, contradict and undermine photographic traditions through altered images and references. The title of the exhibition is derived from Mark C. Taylor’s “Altarity,”a 1987 book of philosopher Taylor’s writing that brings together his interpretation and synthesis of several modern philosophers’ interpretations of difference and otherness. The artists included in the exhibition employ practices that simultaneously subvert photographic traditions while also employing the medium’s salient characteristics that revolve around the physics of light and light sensitive chemistries, some of which use this property to relate and respond to digital image making technologies.”

The exhibition was selected by co-curators W. Rod Faulds, director of FAU’s  University Galleries, and Jeanie Giebel, FAU Bachelor of Fine Arts graduate (2013), who is currently a curatorial assistant at the Margulies Collection in Miami. Both will contribute essays to a catalogue to be published to document the exhibition. The “Altarations” catalogue will also include an essay by Heather Diack, assistant professor of art history from the University of Miami, who is an expert in conceptual art and the history of photography.

For more information about these artists, or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

Gallery artist Kiel Johnson (whose new solo show is currently on view at the gallery) will produce an open sculpture workshop and visiting artist lecture for the University of Wisconsin this November. Over the course of three days, the artist will collaborate with students on mixed-media works in order to create a fleet of Tall Ships.

Taking place November 11-13th, this project and subsequent lecture is sure to delight and amaze. Similarly, don’t miss “Walldayallday” at Mark Moore Gallery – which remains on view through November 8th, 2014.

The gallery is proud to announce the Norton Museum of Art‘s (FL) acquisition of “Untitled #16” (2006) by Josh Azzarella for its permanent collection.

Since its founding in 1941, The Norton Museum of Art has grown and evolved to become one of Florida’s major cultural institutions. The Museum is internationally known for its distinguished permanent collection featuring American Art, Chinese Art, Contemporary Art, European Art and Photography. Its masterpieces of 19th century and 20th century painting and sculpture include works by Brancusi, Gauguin, Matisse, Miró, Monet, Picasso, Davis, Hassam, Hopper, Manship, O’Keeffe, Pollock and Sheeler.

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 milestone!

Congratulations to Kiel Johnson, whose current exhibition is Artillery Magazine‘s “Pick of the Week!” Says critic Eve Wood:

Damn, Kiel Johnson knows how to draw — not to mention he’s an amateur beekeeper; thus the inspiration for his newest exhibition at Mark Moore where strangely kinetic, hive-like utopias appear to be unraveling, creating a damnable system of ultimate unreliability. Sound familiar, humans? Johnson’s genius is that he celebrates these jettisoned utopias, yet despite the near-perfect beauty inherent in the details, one has the overall sense that their blissful disintegration is of our own making. After all, we can gage our human atrocities against the natural world simply by studying the microcosmic universe of the honey bees, and find, sadly, that we are all too barren. 

Kiel’s show remains on view through November 8, 2014. For more information about the artist or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

Ryan Wallace will open a solo show of new work at Susan Inglett Gallery (NY) tomorrow, October 23, from 6-8pm. Titled “Slo Crostic,” the show will remain on view through December 4, 2014, and focus on new abstract paintings, collage, and sculpture by the artist. Says the gallery:

Wallace’s process of abstraction is based in materiality, working methodically back from the detritus left behind in the studio, the ends become the means. The artist delves into the technical and formal properties of abstract painting by creating reliefs that prize texture, light and surface tension. By limiting his palette Wallace makes the medium the message, the works are chromatically minimalist, and materially maximalist. Through these material choices we are brought directly into the studio, with both paintings and sculptures serving as time capsules of production.

The stacked sculptures combine Carl Andre’s floor pieces and the serial reproduction of Sol Lewitt with an additional expressionist gesture; Minimalism gone rogue. Wallace also cites Bruce Naumann’s “Mapping The Studio” yet in this case the absence of human presence is ultimately the step from subjecthood to objecthood, from choice to chance. These objects serve as surrogate paintings for the artist, incorporating elements that cannot function in two dimensional space. While reading as sculpture the conversation remains about painting through the artist’s use of shared language and material calling our attention to the mark and to the way that information is gathered and displayed in an aesthetic mise-en-scène.

Wallace received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RI). He was the 2011 recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, and has had solo exhibitions in Copenhagen, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. He has also shown work at the Frans Masereel Center (Belgium), Torrance Art Museum (CA), Katzen Arts Center (D.C.), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (CA), and numerous other venues around the world. His work is featured in the public collections of the U.S. Department of the Treasury (D.C.), the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (CA), and the Cleveland Clinic (OH), among others. Wallace is also represented by Cooper Cole Gallery (Toronto), Marianne Friis Gallery (Copenhagen), and Susan Inglett Gallery (New York). The artist lives and works in New York.

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

The gallery congratulates Penelope Umbrico on her recent review in the Los Angeles Times! Written by Sharon Mizota, the article expounds on Umbrico’s distinctive engagement with technology, photography, and nostalgia. Says Mizota:

“The further we move from traditional technologies, it seems, the deeper the pull to revisit them. Penelope Umbrico’s digital prints at Mark Moore were created on a smartphone but look like old-fashioned photographic accidents. Plagued — indeed, overwhelmed — by light leaks, misalignments and color gels gone awry, they are striking evidence of a collective nostalgia for our vanishing analog past.

[Ansel] Adams may be the inspiration, but his particular vision isn’t at issue here. Our image of the mountain is no longer based on light beaming through a ground glass, but on data beaming through a satellite.”

To read the full review, please visit the LA Times website. For information about the artist, or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.