When describing his paintings, Gabriel Liston often uses words commonly associated with cinematic film creation: shot and frame, story and sketch, backstory and narrative. Many of his works—small paintings rendered in black-and-white or color—depict scenes from real events taken from the artist’s life. However, once painted, these moments from Liston’s life—due in part to their modest scale and a pervasive illusory quality—become surreal vignettes, yet[…..]
Painting and collage are processes composed in layers—often opaque in nature, each altering or shrouding its antecedent. Traditional two-dimensional compositions begin with a canvas, then some form of underpaint, followed by a series of strata—at times scraped away and at others built up—that eventually form a composition that becomes an entirety greater than the sum of its parts. Chris Rusak’s newest works, a series called[…..]
Though Susan Cantrick’s paintings are composed mostly of abstracted planes of color, they defy any notion of flatness. The more one looks at Cantrick’s rich fields of color and intricate sections of textured patterning, the more her uniquely layered perspective comes into view. Cantrick regularly employs many of the traditional elements of painting: scale, shape, color, tone, line, perspective, and texture. However, she mixes these traditional[…..]
While some artists might shy away from encouraging an open-ended, potentially endless string of associations, Brooke Reinhold Richard seems to embrace it as she leads viewers through her paintings with a loose architecture of visual clues. Her work includes motifs not unlike the tropes and symbols used in the Surrealist tradition of painting, which created numerous meaningful, often personal, associations. Richard paints serially, creating one[…..]
Christopher Manzione works with a number of mediums: sculpture, video, performance, drawing, digital rendering, mobile- and web-based applications, digital imaging, and 3D rendering. Across this plethora of forms, Manzione explores the perceived and actual divisions and overlaps between notions of digital vs. analog and organic vs. inorganic, as well as combinations of these two sets. Manzione strives to unite two distant poles without placing a[…..]
The words “yo no soy Romantica,” or “I am not romantic,” are written in large orange cursive letters on a flat blue background; the text is partially hidden by the green cactus planted in a bright pink pot in the foreground of Anna Valdez’s illustration Yo No Soy Romantica (2013). Whether or not the artist intended to indicate the cactus as the speaker of these[…..]
In Joe Webb’s Stirring Up A Storm (2014), the nearly full moon peers resolutely down like a removed voyeur, while a continent-sized Sunbeam Mixmaster Junior (an electric mixer from the 1950s) stirs Earth’s atmosphere with its twin silver beaters to create massive, hurricane-like weather patterns. From the description alone, issues of global warming and energy crises come to mind; however, the well-crafted humor, imaginative aesthetic,[…..]
