In the world of a 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. Weintraub explores potentials for the future of humanity through large-scale hyper-colored narrative paintings, which are saturated with information and describe a world where morals have fallen and children act without consequence.

In Weintraub’s new body of work, the children are up against a new enemy, paint itself. The new piles of paint are presented as an amorphous blob, which act as proto-versions of the children as well as a metaphor for the state of painting itself, in its death or perhaps its afterlife.

The artist is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and is currently an assistant professor of painting and drawing at Indiana University. He has completed recent several solo exhibitions including, Whatever Shall We Do With These Piles and Piles of Paint at the Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, All the Way Home at Projects Gallery in Philadelphia and Cloudy With a Chance of Apocalypse at Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn, NY. Weintraub will participate in an upcoming group show titledSigns of the Apocalypse/Rapture this summer at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago.

Phillips approaches painting and collage as both object and illusion, often creating images that explore the relationship between light and sound. The artist’s work synthesizes information into an entirely graphic language, starting with the formal concerns of surface, composition, color and tension, while introducing a range of subtle contemporary references and symbols. The resulting works unite a methodology, which folds the formal concerns of Modernist painting into the intimacy of folk art.

Since completing his MFA at Boston University in 2007, Phillips has exhibited works at Mehr gallery, Place Space Gallery and Jack the Pelican Presents, in New York City. He has also exhibited with Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC and SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine. The artist currently teaches painting at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Julie Henson‘s drawings explore the breadth of religious extremism in the Southern United States. The Charleston, South Carolina native examines historically significant religious rituals and the ways in which the modern South maintains these practices. The work often depicts subjects united in spiritual ecstasy, while undergoing the transcendent religious acts of holding snakes, placing one’s hands in fire, speaking in tongues and the laying of hands for miraculous healing. As a Southerner, the artist tracks both religious and historical traditions that merge to construct a long history, which is full of dark secrets and strong bonds.

Henson is a graduate of the School of the Arts at the College of Charleston and is an MFA candidate at the California College of the Arts. Her work will be featured in the upcoming issue of Beautiful/Decay Magazine. She has exhibited throughout the Southeast, including several shows with Redux Contemporary Art Center.

Nashville-based photographer, painter and draftsman Chris Scarborough creates a diverse range of works, which reference the archetypes of Eastern pop culture, art history and science fiction. The cultural concepts of cuteness and beauty mixed with the playful violence of Japanese cartoons inform Scarborough’s imagery and process. While working in graphite, painting or photography, the artist painstakingly renders his subjects with absolute precision in an exploration into the nature of reality and ideals.

Scarborough’s drawings were recently featured in Hi Fructose Magazine Vol. 10 this spring. The Savannah College of Art and Design graduate recently completed solo exhibitions at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana, and the Foley Gallery in New York City. The artist is currently exhibiting Portraits of Aftermath at the Curator’s Office in Washington, D.C.

Seely’s interest in nature and the changing environment is reflected in her vivid photographs of night-lit cityscapes. For an artist with a strong mind and an innovative way of translating her message, her photographs are remarkably reserved and still. Seely’s scenes are familiar, yet evoke the sensation of jamais vu –where the commonplace becomes eerily unrecognizable — inviting the viewer into a place of investigation. Seely’s images illustrate the world’s reliance and connection to modern technology while creating a tension between the surface documentation of a photograph and the complex reality that lies beyond. Her works investigate how inherent beauty often has the power to both reflect and obscure a darker and more complicated truth.

This year, Seely will exhibit works from her ongoing landscape project, Lux, at Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and the Country Club Gallery in Cincinnati. The artist is also a principal member of Civil Twilight, a design collective that is pioneering Lunar Resonant Streetlights, which dim and brighten in correlation with the brightness of the moon.

Rice is a new media artist that explores how traditional methods of learning are influenced by mass media and digital technology. His videos and sculptures create a dialogue between the distanced, purely optical domain of the tele-visual and a sensual awareness held in the body and mind. The artist embraces digital media as a vehicle for modern communication while experimenting with both video and sculptural objects that examine visual perception and temporal awareness. The artist typically calls for the viewer’s participation in order to activate the work, thus confronting the passive function of receiving information from digital media.

Rice is currently pursuing his PhD at the University of Washington, Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media in Seattle. Recently, he had solo exhibitions at the 911 Media Center and Lawrimore Project in Seattle, as well as a solo show with the Portland Art Academy. In 2006, the artist received a Trust Fellowship from the Joan Mitchell Foundation for his sculpture The History of Television: 1974-2006.

The artist’s work is linked together by an unmistakable humor and graphic sensibility. Mulroney moves seamlessly through several types of media, including installation, painting, drawing and photography, not allowing any one medium to define his practice. Similarly, the artist freely selects pop-cultural sources to serve as inspiration for his works, pulling from magazines, cartoons, and advertisements. Synthesizing these sources with disconnected personal memories, Mulroney’s work results in an array of irreverent imagery infused with unsurpassed wit.

Mulroney is a graduate of Casino and Gaming Management Degree Program at Morrisville State University. This year, the artist has exhibited Follow the Nosebleeds with Mixed Greens in New York City and Wet With Glee at ArtSpace in New Haven, Connecticut. Mulroney has also participated in countless group exhibitions including works at Evergreene Gallery in Geneva, Switzerland, RAID Projects in Los Angeles and the National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland.

Artist, Michael Rea, creates large-scale, highly imaginative, technological objects out of obsessively constructed wood. However, the very material used renders the objects useless, opening a dialogue about a world of possibilities that simply can never be. The artist often utilizes fictitious objects related to pop-culture movies and television shows, allowing the work to recreate the essence of the object while forcing its reality to remain only a dream. The large, insensible objects construct an absurd story that couldn’t exist in real life, similar to the movies from which they are sourced, offering a sense of humor and wit that allows the work to be accessible and imaginative.

Mike Rea is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He recently completed a solo exhibition at The Co-Prosperity Sphere (C-PS), an experimental cultural center in Chicago, and participated in the Wisconsin Triennial at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison. The artist’s work was also recently acquired by the West Collection and will travel internationally though the SEI Investment firm.

Opening Saturday, May 23rd will be the exhibition 1000 DAYS, presented by DailyServing.com and Scion. The exhibition will take place at the Scion Installation L.A. Gallery in Culver City, California. 1000 DAYS celebrates a milestone for DailyServing.com as the online contemporary art publication approaches 1000 daily features. Since the fall of 2006, DailyServing.com has highlighted a cross section of contemporary visual art from around the world. Honoring this commitment, 1000 DAYS delivers an exciting mix of emerging talent, focusing for this exhibition on artists in the United States.

Christina Seely

1000 DAYS also marks the first curated exhibition for DailyServing.com, bringing together eight emerging artists. The exhibition will feature recent works by Caleb Weintraub, Chris Scarborough, Christina Seely, Julie Henson, Michael Rea, Mark Mulroney, Matt Phillips and Tivon Rice. These artists, all of whom have been previously featured on the site, work in a variety of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and new media. The diversity of the artwork in 1000 DAYS celebrates the myriad of influences utilized by visual artists today. Collectively, these artists address many of the major issues found in contemporary art, combining a range of conceptual and aesthetic elements while highlighting topics such as pop culture, technology, and current social issues, often through the lens of art history.

Throughout next week, DailyServing.com will highlight each artist featured in the exhibition and will present rare photos of the installation and images of the artist’s work. A full color catalog will accompany the exhibition.

1000 DAYS will be on view from May 23rd until June 13th, 2009.

Tivon Rice