January 10 - February 23, 2008
Tomory Dodge (LA) • Ingrid Calame (LA) • Eric Sall (NY) • Gordon Terry (NY) • Nicholas Nyland (Seattle) • Yoon Lee (SF) • Tiffany Calvert (NY) • Joseph Park (Seattle) | Curated by Alex Ohge
Lawrimore Project is pleased to present the second of a three-part series devoted to contemporary painting strategies. Curated by Gallery Manager, Alex Ohge, The Prom: A Semi-formal Survey of Semi-formal Painting is a pure celebration of the medium. This semi-formal survey brings together a group of artists from around the country all completely devoted to the process of painting and all exploring the semi-formal terrain where representation meets painting for painting's sake.
TOMORY DODGE
Dodge’s work epitomizes the semi-formal tenets of the exhibition by allowing the paint and its application to work equally against representational elements. Dodge’s loaded brush is pulled across the canvas leaving heavy trails of streaked color and grey matter. The landscapes and architectures created by these gestures seem to float in space barely held together by thick lines of paint ready to collapse or change at any moment. Dodge calls on Richter’s squeegees and even Lichtenstein's ‘brushstrokes’ but moves beyond these references allowing his trust and devotion to the medium to take over the work. Tomory Dodge is shown courtesy of ACME., Los Angeles
ERIC SALL
Sall pulls, scrapes and rakes the paint across the canvas to create swirled ribbons of color and salt water taffy blobs that are loosely held together by backdrops of washes of paint. He tackles the medium with a deep understanding of what paint can do yet constantly finds new and challenging ways of pushing the medium. The work is held together with some structure, offering references to architecture and landscape while deploying his own lexicon of abstract gestures.
As ATM Gallery, New York notes, “Sall uses free-association and instinct when approaching his canvases. Utilizing the tradition within painting of presenting a figure, a protagonist, over a marginal background, he merges marks to create a non-representational figure sitting atop a more general background as a nod to representational painting without depicting any discernable forms. His manipulation of paint is informed by art history equally with instances from his personal experience. Magazine advertisements, movies, logos, his youth, and background are all sources from which he draws his inspiration. He states that his influence can be ‘a memory of the Northern Lights at 3:00 a.m. on a secluded dirt road in the middle of South Dakota to an image of a brand name jacket in a magazine that I desired. It is just as likely that I would associate graphic marks to designer logos as I would associate a washy field of color to a Midwest sky.’"
Eric Sall is shown courtesy of ATM Gallery, New York
INGRID CALAME
Calame's bold contrasting colors, meticulous tracing and transfer technique is evident here in her preliminary drawings for future paintings. Appropriating the contours of stains she finds on the streets of various cities, Calame’s technique mimics the appearance of gestural abstraction with a subversive take on everything from the spilled canvases of Pollock, the piss paintings of Warhol, and the stained canvases of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, to the conceptually-driven stain paintings, sculptures and photographs of Ed Ruscha. Calame states, “I trace the lacey stains left by the evaporation of nameless liquids, their contours determined by the viscosity of the vanished fluid and the texture of the surface which it pools.” Part chance, part choice, in Calame’s hands these anonymous, abstract forms come into focus. A small blob becomes a shoe print. A stretched arching line is now a tread mark from a race track. A series of loops is now made clear as graffiti from the side of a building. Calame documents the history we want to dismiss. Her layers are numerous and calculated in both form and content.
Ingrid Calame’s work shown courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York
TIFFANY CALVERT
The works create visual dilemmas between foreground and background, depth and flatness, idealized and inherently confused spaces. More recent paintings are concerned with Westward expansion, "Manifest Destiny" and "American-ness": Images of domination from Roosevelt's mansion and hunting trophies, a curtain from Charles Wilson Peale's Cabinet of Curiosities (possessing the world), images referencing the Great Plains and the Interstate Highway system, turn-of-the-century reapers on the Plains emblematic of the Grapes of Wrath,the Great Depression and the somewhat parallel disappointment in some of those who went West to find gold. —Tiffany Calvert.
Tackling themes of spatial illusion and juxtaposed environments, Calvert’s paintings challenge what we understand as landscape and architecture. Tightly rendered interiors are meshed with loose washes of muted colors creating a strangely beautiful dream-like environment. The artist’s painterly execution constantly reminds us that her work is as much about the medium as it is about the content. In her latest body of work Calvert continues to explore similar themes while adding new layers for the viewer to negotiate. Detailed patterns suggesting wallpaper or fabric are mixed with piles of furniture giving these dark interiors a sense history. Although there are passages of tight rendering, the work still remains somewhat loose and painterly reminding the viewer that the work is still about the celebration of the medium.
Tiffany Calvert is shown courtesy of Lisa Boyle Gallery, Chicago
NICHOLAS NYLAND
If the painting on canvas and watercolors presented here are what we typically associate with traditional manners of working and presentation, his floor cloth and sculpture force us to reconsider just where and how a painting can exist in this world.
I intend to conjure a world or a space for imagination and reverie in my work that may manifest itself in miniature form or room sized wall drawing/painting installations. My work is driven by a fascination with the life of form, the nature of creation and the will to decorate. I feel reassured to borrow freely from our gloriously diverse visual culture because, as George Steiner reminds us, “there are no more beginnings”; we are playing with all the cards. The true creation, the art, lies in the transcendence of those parts into an animate whole. —Nicholas Nyland
Nicholas Nyland is shown courtesy of SOIL Gallery, Seattle
GORDON TERRY
The paintings are manipulated on a 10’ x 8' glass work table that is mounted on a hydraulic jack system. The glass is suspended on 4 jacks that connect to the table top with universal joints. Thus, I am able to tilt the work surface on both an x and a y axis, using gravity as one means to move paint around. Most of the other procedures I subject the paint to are hands-off as well. I use blasts of pressurized air, wet into wet dripping and pouring, and various specially designed brushes and paint spreaders. Once the "painting" dries on the glass, it is peeled off the glass; the resulting translucent skin of acrylic paint is then adhered to cast acrylic sheet . The splatter areas originally occur on the glass as well, they are then mapped out and transferred bit by bit on to the acrylic sheet.
There's always a confusion implied between my materials and the way I manipulate them. The sterile, sleek, refined and clinical qualities of my cast, molded, and spilled acrylic polymers are filtered through the fluid, the organic, the chaotic, and the ornamental. Categorical shifts like these are very meaningful to me--much more so than the actual choice of physical material. I'm fascinated by the ways in which, for instance, my paintings can reference at once psychedelia, science fiction, modernism, the rococo, decadence, and hermetic texts--wholesome, natural beauty, and toxic, synthetic glamour. — Gordon Terry
With juicy fluid gestures and heavy use of thick passages of paint, Gordon emphasizes materials and technique in his work. His complex use of the medium and plexiglas as surface further challenges what we know about paint and its characteristics. His swirls of juicy blobs give a nod to Pollock and abstraction yet offer the viewer so much more to contemplate. Beyond the science and microscopic environments created in the work, the titles provide challenging and humorous possibilities to debate. Yet in the end, we can sit back and simply absorb the visually stunning quality of the work.
Gordon Terry is shown courtesy of ATM Gallery, New York
JOSEPH PARK
Although he painted as an undergraduate, Joseph Park came out of Cal Arts as an installation, performance and video artist. His last few installations were actually sculptures about painting. His breakthrough came when he decided to make paintings about sculpture. He has been painting ever since. Recently Park has shifted his painterly attention to portraiture. He had avoided using specific characters in past work, substituting animal imagery to convey human emotions and conditions. In this portrait of Leipzig painter, Tim Eitel, Park takes identification as a given. As in the rest of this series of portraits, he is deploying new mark making for each subject, allowing painterly expressions to work for, by, or against their facial expressions. Eitel is known for his large canvases in muted palettes that combine geometric abstraction with photographic realism. Park’s portrait combines photographic realism with his own version of a ‘soft’ Cubism that also approaches certain Futurist mannerisms, treading that fine line between the mimetic and the abstract.
Due to the interest in this series, Park has been commissioned for a number of individual portraits. We welcome your inquiry if you are interested in such a commission.
YOON LEE
Lee is regarded for her colorful, palimpsest paintings in acrylic on large sheets of PVC. Digitally manipulated silhouettes of engineering structures provide the backdrop while wild splashes of gestural abstractions that swirl throughout simultaneously activate and obscure these recognizable structures. Even these seemingly instantaneous gestures begin digitally. Lee starts with scanned images, digitally rendering them into flat planes with their accompanying low-resolution pixilation. She then painstakingly transfers the image—dot by tedious dot—to the surface with squeeze-nozzle bottles containing a resinous acrylic. For this recent series of “Subatomic Verve” pieces on frosted Mylar, Lee has distilled her imagery and palette down to the ‘simple’ gestures seen here.
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