Drowned Neon Rose - i like your work juried show / winter 2020

Beauty is important in the face of ruin, death, and disaster.

Storytelling is important in an age of lies, misinformation and flooded libraries.

Right now I am looking for a wary and embattled beauty, the title drawn from a combination of “Drowned World” and “Oh Rose thou art sick,” layered in what I feel is contemporary color, neon pink and yellow, though it is kind of dirty.  We all have this kind of sinking feeling, but many of these works feel like narratives of survival, privacy, intimacy, ordinary suburban sadness.  I’m looking for hope in the ruin and collapse, a prefiguring of a way forward.

Many of the situations are candlelit, fire lit or sustain their own light through color or flora.  Art should emit light.

Neon is important.  I know a lot of it is fugitive, but it feels right, especially since this is a screen show.

There is a kind of overheated plastic wonder even to the scenes that seem normal, as if we are witnessing them from the future, wistfully.  What do we want to keep, what do we already mourn, what should we image now before we lose it? 

Many objects gathered, recorded, left strewn about, remembering.  Our futurism is bent with melancholy, our objects sing songs long after us while we look at them.  Each still life feels filled with rubble, but we are still finding things underneath, moss growing in sludge.

I curated for a mood, gothic but neon, Spanish moss-covered, dank romantic. A flooded floating world.  I curated for high skill but also for labor, I like things that look labored over and invested in, I think that adds to their talismanic worth, their secret power is time with human hands and minds.

If the scene seems cheerful, there is a kind of snarling darkness underneath.  Are they using candles for fun?  Is that poodle about to bite or catch? 

I thoroughly enjoyed reviewing all the work together as a group and there were many more submissions I wanted to include, literally shows more, but I was curating for mood and a kind of dark humor.  I think more shows should be curated with this wide-open call approach on the internet, I feel like I’ve seen so many different things and I am so grateful to you all for sharing your work with me.

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Juror Kirstin Lamb February 2020

Reception Thursday, March 7, 7-9 pm
Featuring artwork by Katie Lane, Keith MacLelland, Stephanie Todhunter, and Amantha Tsaros

In Darker Joys four CAA artists invite you into their creative playground to revel in your base human instincts: a tangible expression of excess, a fearless exploration of medium and subject and an eagerness to surprise the viewer in ways both bold and subtle.

We encourage you to gorge on those sweets and embrace the guilt and pleasure: lazy weekends, late night bacchanalia, tv binge watching, fast food, rollercoaster riding. Nothing is too frivolous, wicked or absurd.

Come up into our clubhouse! Push the red button! Grab the last cookie! All the fun with none of the consequences.

Come on, join us. EVERYONE is doing it.

"Materials Matter 2—Lavaughan Jenkins and Friends"

Artists pushing the boundaries of painting, at the Suffolk University Gallery.

The Suffolk University Gallery presents Materials Matter 2, a group exhibit of paintings by Lavaughan Jenkins and friends and the second of a two-part series focused on the Boston-based artist, from Dec. 4, 2018, through Jan. 22, 2019.

A reception will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 6, in the gallery, featuring a talk with the artists at 6 p.m.

The two exhibits—Materials Matter 1 and Materials Matter 2—notate the continual elasticity of painting as it has been evolving over centuries, as an inverse mirror of the ever-accelerating changes in our culture in the Digital Age, and how that is changing the nature and perception of painting. They open up the conversation among practitioners who are pushing the boundaries of the medium. The works shown are compelling both individually and collectively, as each artist has a different relationship with that conversation and with the material itself.

Artists

Lavaughan Jenkins’ paintings push the boundaries of the medium by using oil paint to make three dimensional work, or “3D Paintings.”

The late Julie S Graham was compelled by the overlooked, the uncertain, and the unpredictable. She constructs improbable combinations of paint and materials; colors and textures randomly collide to form surprising and odd relationships.

Katie Lane, Class of 2016, works in a reactively rigorous subtractive and additive process. Building up and then sanding, sawing, cutting, and beating down dense applications of paint, media, and industrial materials, the process is often evident in the final work.

Josh Jefferson is one of a new generation of painters who are actively engaging the figure as their primary subject matter. Drawing from a range of sources, including comics and art history, Jefferson strives to imbue his work with the directness of its facture, and the content of his paintings is inextricably linked to the simplicity of their making.

Destiny Palmer says that her work becomes the solution to the questions and thoughts evoked by her surroundings. Within the work, she relates color, pattern, and texture to sound. What does a sound look like, or what would a color sound like? These are steps in creating a composition that is based on a visual language.

Curated by Noé Jimenez
 
The works exhibited in Relief are paintings "built from scratch". Each painting's deliberate construction emphasizes the preliminary, support, and building processes as crucial elements in the final product. Hong Hong's natural paintings are formed and manipulated by the outdoor environment, building substance through nature's materiality.

The cyclical phenomena of nature--churning and dying the paper pulp--directly reflects the impermanence of the work's process and result. Katie Lane and Noé Jimenez coat and envelope ready made or constructed forms, their painting's building process guided by architectural, environmental, and cultural influences. The layers of Lane and Jimenez's work are concentrated impressions of the elements that form the traditionally "completed" painting. Cristina Umaña Durán applies her love of drawing onto installation and textile work as a method of bringing flatness into the three dimensional through site-specific, printed fabric sculptures.

By redefining the structure of the painting's physical support, each artist establishes an individualized context. Existing as a combination of image and form, sculpture and painting, these works represent both artistic and literal Relief. 

Exhibit Dates: November 7–December 2, 2017
Opening reception: Friday, November 17, 6–9 pm

The Archetype: in Jungian psychology, archetypes are defined as “a collectively inherited unconscious idea, pattern of thought, image, etc., universally present in individual psyches.”

The various archetypes of the feminine have long been a rich and varied subject in art.  Marilyn Monroe, Mother Teresa, the Virgin Mary, Cleopatra, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bonnie Parker, the list goes on and on throughout history. These archetypes have played an enormous role in how we perceive (conscious or unconscious) and characterize the feminine of today.

The exhibit’s proposed goal is to bring these archetypes (the mother, slut, saint, victim, seductress, goddess) into the public eye in an informative, powerful, and creative manner.

Exhibition Dates - June 22 - August 27, 2017

Sweet n Low features artwork from over 130 local, national, and international artists who extend the genre of cute from cuddly and precious to creepy and ironic. From kitsch and Margaret Keane’s Big Eyes, to Japanese anime and contemporary Pop Art, we’re unleashing the roly-poly, goofily-gamboling, saccharine-honeyed creatures on this earth and beyond!  Sweet n Low is part invitational and part juried exhibition, juried by Evan Pricco of Juxtapoz magazine and Antler Gallery, Portland, OR.