Artist Jay Kelly currently has a new series of works on view in the exhibition titled Rawness & Polish with Commissary Arts in Venice Beach, California. The works on view will include several medium and small-format collages. Some of the works are illuminated by light boxes, constructed of photographs, stencils, spray paint, and found imagery. The artist successfully fuses his personal interests of natural and urban-based elements, found in the land and cityscape of Southern California, with a highly decorative method of visual arrangement. The result reflects a slice of contemporary life synthesized into a graphically compartmentalized surface.

Kelly is a graduate of the UCLA, and has recently exhibited with Go Go Gallery in Miami, Florida and Museum Works Gallery in New York City and Los Angeles. The artist was also commissioned this year to create a new work of art for The Abbot Kinney District Association, for this year’s Abbot Kinney Festival in Southern California.

Currently on view at the Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York City are new paintings and sculpture by artist Mark Shetabi. For his second solo exhibition with the gallery, Shetabi was constructed subtle paintings in a muted palette, exploring ideas related live performance, public space, crowd manipulation and the energy that exists between the performer and audience. For his exhibition titled ARENA, the artist has closely examined the video documentation of an 1985 performance in Wembley Stadium featuring the band Queen. During this performance, Queen’s front man Freddy Mercury successfully built a wave a ecstatic emotion which took over the crowd and created a forceful spectacle.

From this point, the artist has created several scenes that are related to the moments direct before or during the performance. Oddly, the viewer is given the opportunity to view the magnitude of these moment through the static medium of painting.

Shetabi is a MFA graduate of Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and is a 2002 recipient of the Pew Fellowship in the Arts. The artist has completed solo exhibitions at the Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, Project Room in Brooklyn and with Ration 3 in San Francisco.

In the world of a Caleb Weintraub painting, it is clear that something has gone terribly wrong. Stern-faced, costume adorned children run rampant with no apparent boundaries, tracking down the last remaining adults and turning them into wall-mounted trophies of the hunt. In his recent body of work titled Whatever Shall We Do with these Piles and Piles of Paint?, currently on view at the Peter Miller Gallery in Chicago, the artist introduces a new antagonist, the amorphous pile of paint. An MFA graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Weintraub has risen to success exhibiting with galleries such as Jack the Pelican Presents in New York, Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC, and Projects Gallery in Philadelphia.

In a recent interview with DailyServing.com, Caleb discussed the future the children, the meaning of the pile, and the afterlife of painting.

Read More »

The photographs of Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky lead the viewer through the extremities of commercialism from a behind the scenes point of view. Desolate oil sites, packed and impersonal factories in China, abandoned boat sites, and mines and quarries are just a few scenes that the artist has captured in countries across the world. Burtynsky’s photos depict the product of extreme industrialized development and its affect on nature and humankind. In 1985, the artist founded the Toronto Image Works, a darkroom, custom image lab and new media training center. Recent shows include the touring exhibition titled “The China Series” which was on view at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and the Presentation House in Vancouver amongst others. This year, the artist had a major survey of 65-70 works at the Gemeente Museum Helmond in the Netherlands. Some of Burtynsky’s awards include the Officer of the Order of Canada (2006) and the Flying Elephants Foundation Fellowship (2004).

The Los Angeles Museum of Art has delved into the literate glamour of Vanity Fair, hosting the magazine’s traveling exhibition of historic photographs. Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008 is a collaboration between the magazine and London’s National Portrait Gallery. LACMA will be its only US showing. Sponsored by Burberry and curated by Terence Pepper and David Friend, the exhibition includes photographs by a staggering collection of 20th Century icons: Cecil Beaton, Julian Broad, Imogen Cunningham, Annie Leibovitz, Man Ray, Mary Ellen Mark, Steven Meisel, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, Edward Steichen, and Mario Testino, among others. The subjects of the photographs are no less impressive, ranging from W.B. Yeats to Madonna.

A series of panel discussions and film showings will accompany the exhibition, foregrounding the romanticized image of culture that Vanity Fair creates. On January 11, LACMA will film Grey Gardens, the 1975 documentary that featured two eccentric women living in an East Hampton Mansion. A February 24 panel discussion will explore the constructed image of celebrity.

Vanity Fair Portraits continues through March 1, 2009.

Jack The Pelican Presents is currently showing a new body of work by New York based artist Rob Fisher, These are the People in Your Neighborhood. Fisher’s paintings often use the flattened table top positioned in a shallow space as a motif to frame his narratives. All of his paintings are executed on handmade paper, allowing him to incorporate other technical processes such as silkscreen. For this show, each painting is a documentation of a real crime that took place in New York City circa 1900-2007.

Described as “Hitchcockian,” Fisher’s paintings set up a tableau of materials and evidence for viewers to decode. Some of the crimes he represents are less known, while some have become infamous, such as the 2005 “Fake Firefighter Rapes Woman in New York City Apartment.”

Fisher received his BFA from the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, FL and was previously represented by the Marlborough Gallery. His last solo show took place in 2003 at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn.

These are the People in Your Neighborhood will remain at Jack the Pelican presents until December 21, 2008.

Sweeping the BQE is the title of Jessica Rohrer’s second solo exhibition with P.P.O.W Gallery in New York City. The works on view investigate the area surrounding the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, a throughway that was designed to alleviate traffic within Brooklyn and on the bridges to Manhattan. For the past seven years, Rohrer has lived within 100 ft of the BQE, and has been able to intimately document the area through the medium of painting. Using photography, memory, and observation, the artist constructs quiet images void of figures. The main subject in the paintings become cars with a highly reflective surface. This mirror-like surface serves as a tool to offer more information about the surrounding area. The paintings not only document the areas around the BQE. The works in Sweeping the BQE also serve as documentation of the artist’s own life, a theme that has been consistent through her past several bodies of work.

Rohrer is a MFA graduate of Yale University School of Art. Since graduation, the artist has completed two solo exhibitions with P.P.O.W and one with Arena in Brooklyn.