San Francisco-based artist Val Britton constructs and integrates maps with other referenced imagery such as freeways, billboard scaffolding and road signs. The artist uses this process to navigate her past, charting memories and creating a personal record through symbols and metaphors. The artist’s laborious process is created completely by hand, fusing the media of printmaking, collage, painting and drawing and fiber arts within a single[…..]
Chris Ballantyne‘s paintings, drawings and sculptural installations are an examination of suburban space. Ballantyne’s inspiration is drawn from the universalities of his different neighborhood homes. Ideas of land boundaries, manipulated space and economic design are developed out of observations from a variety of urban and rural settings. Ballantyne’s works are focused on architecture and landscape design and often explore complex relationships between individuals and their[…..]
Brooklyn-based realist painter David Jon Kassan creates work grounded in a formalist style that captures elements of the figure and multi-layered, textured surfaces. While his subject matter varies, the artist primarily follows the philosophies of the Ashcan School of American Realists. Kassan often mixes the attention of the figure with the surrounding surfaces to create works that simultaneously reference Abstract Expressionism and traditional portraiture. The[…..]
“Secrets and Cymbals, Smoke and Scissors (My Friend Dash’s Wall in the Future)” is work by conceptual artist Dan Colen that is a life-size recreation of the interior wall of a friend. In Colen’s version, each element attached to the wall — every sticker, newspaper, photo and hand-written note — has been illusionistically painted by the artist. Colen extends this process of painting into other[…..]
The paintings of artist Jim Gaylord push the boundaries of identified space and the ambiguity of object relation. Referencing elements of traditional surrealism, Gaylord updates his method of creation by distilling information from film stills. Using several layers of transparent film, the artist is able to render specific elements in the found image that reduces the still down to spatial planes, shadows and general landscape[…..]
Creating work in the category of Chinese contemporary art termed “Political Pop,” artist Wang Guangyi’s paintings at once reference propaganda images from the Cultural Revolution and imagery of contemporary popular culture. The vast amount of social images brought forth through the Maoist Regime is synthesized through these works to offer a critique of the Cultural Revolution historically and ideologically. This critique is furthered by the[…..]
Mark Fairnington paints images that attempt to classify the natural world. His work focuses primarily on the human need to categorize and group everything in our surroundings, addressing both the need to record as well as the need to collect. Many of his images depict animals, especially birds and insects, prepared for documentation and dissection. The paintings reference still-life images of the 16th and 17th[…..]
