Monday, January 7, 2013

LAURA SPONG & KATIE WALKER EXHIBITIONS @ Gallery 80808/Vista Studios





SATURDAY, FEB. 2, 2:00 pm:

KATIE WALKER 

GALLERY TALK

followed from 3:00 – 5:00 by the


THE FAIR-WEATHER FRIENDS SECOND-CHANCE RECEPTION


for


the SPONG/WALKER

Exhibitions





if ART Gallery Presents
@ Gallery 80808/Vista Studios

LAURA SPONG

Swinging On A High Note
&
KATIE WALKER
Words I Like

Jan. 25 – Feb. 5, 2013


Opening Reception: Fri., Jan. 25, 6 – 9 pm


Gallery Talk Katie Walker: Sat. Feb. 2, 2013


For a PREVIEW of Laura Spong, Swinging On A High Note, CLICK HERE.
For a PREVIEW of Katie Walker, Words I Like, CLICK HERE.
To SEE IMAGES of Katie Walker installing more than 300 pieces of her Journal Entries series in a grid on one wall, CLICK HERE
For installation images CLICK HERE.

Pick up a free copy of the trifold below about Katie Walker and her exhibition.









Tuesday, January 1, 2013

ESSAY Mary Gilkerson – From The Edge Of The Highway: 300 Daily Paintings








MARY GILKERSON DEVELOPS A HABIT

By Wim Roefs


         “Our culture tends to make us feel divorced from the natural world,” Mary Gilkerson says on her website. “I want my artwork to give the viewer a chance to re-engage with that world, to experience and recover a sense of place.” In part to intensify that engagement, her viewers’ and her own, and in part as a marketing device, Gilkerson in 2012 decided to paint a small painting every day for three months. The 90 x 90 Daily Painting Project was born.
         Every day, the Columbia, S.C., artist posted an image on her blog and sent it into the world through email blasts and social media to engage her audience in preparation for 701 Center for Contemporary Art’s Columbia Open Studios 2012, which took place in April. People could buy a painting instantly or stop by her studio during Open Studios to see the work in person and buy it.
         Gilkerson’s new practice was facilitated by her daily trek to the Lower Richland area to take care of and ride her horse. Driving in the countryside with a new painting in mind made her look at the landscape near roads and highways around Columbia more deliberately. “The project enriched my studio practice in both expected and unexpected ways,” she says. “Working from observation every day really deepened my connection with the places I worked.”
         While she continued to create larger paintings and monotypes after the 90 days were over, Gilkerson missed the connection with the land and the one-painting-a-day routine. For Open Studios 2013, she upped the ante with 12 Squared: 144 Daily Paintings, as before working on site and through photos and sketches. “The edge of a highway is a strange intersection of nature and culture with a wealth of potential subjects,” she says. “We all move so fast that we don’t see the world in the same detail that people did before modern transportation came along. I hope that the paintings will encourage people to pay more attention to the world around them, to notice the small and subtle as well as the large and grand.”
         Gilkerson’s daily paintings, which she continued after 12 Squared, are the apotheosis of a process that began when in 2004 she started making monotypes regularly with Greenville, S.C., master printer Phil Garrett. Garrett had introduced her to monotypes in the 1990s during workshops for Gilkerson’s students at her hometown’s Columbia College. She enjoyed the process and in 2003 “started using thinner paints in my paintings, scratching and wiping out areas as well as making direct painterly marks. That’s when I began thinking about making monotypes on a more regular basis.”
         Gilkerson has created some 100 monotypes with Garrett, and making monotypes affected her paintings, which became looser, more direct and more decisive. Making monotypes made Gilkerson, it seems, a more confident and self-assured painter, which facilitates her daily habit.

                                    – Wim Roefs is the owner of if ART Gallery.

         


PREVIEW Conditions of Humans: Hinton, Trotman & Yaghjian

Bob Trotman, Large Person of Interest, 2007, 
wood, tempera, wax, steel, 33 x 36 x 16, $14,000
Bob Trotman, Person of Interest, 2006, 
wood, tempera, wax, steel, 
25 x 25 x 14 in., $12,500
Bob Trotman, Mrs. T, 2006, wood tempera, wax, 
steel, 22 x 20 x 23 in., $9,000

David Yaghjian, Scene XLII Sleeper, 2013,
oil on canvas, 18 x 18 in.,
$1,600/SOLD

David Yaghjian, Scene XLVII Dialogue, 2013,
oil on canvas panel, 12 x 12 in., $1,000


David Yaghjian, Afloat,  2013, monotype, 
10 x 8 in., $450
David Yaghjian, Red Door, 2013, monotype, 
12 x 10 in., $575
David Yaghjian, Yellow Tree, Red Neck, 2013,  
monotype  10 x 10 in., $500

David Yaghjian, Leaving The Stage, 2013, oil on panel, 7 x 5 in., $360

David Yaghjian, Scene XLIV Highway, 2013,
Oil on canvas, 20 x 20 in., $1,760

David Yaghjian, Scene XLV Exit Stage Right,
2013,
oil on canvas, 24 x 24 in., $2,500

David Yaghjian, Scene XLVI Lawnchair Angel, 2013,
 oil on canvas panel, 12 x 12 in., $1,000

David Yaghjian, Scene XLVIII Intermission,
 
2013, oil on canvas panel, 8 x 10 in., $640

David Yaghjian, Scene XLVIX Clearing the Stage, 2013
oil on canvas panel, 9 x 12 in., $720

David Yaghjian, Shiny Things, 2013,
oil on canvas panel, 7 x 5 in., $360
David Yaghjian, Table, 2013, oil on canvas
panel, 8 x 10 in., $640 SOLD

Leslie Hinton, Play Boy Bunny, 2013, 
earthenware, underglazes, glazes, acrylic 
and prismacolor, 13 x 5 x 3.5 in., $600
SOLD


Leslie Hinton, Soul Man, 2013, 
earthenware, underglazes and glazes,
9 x 4 x 2.5 in., $450

Leslie Hinton, Rock'n The Hard Place
2013, earthenware, underglazes and 
glazes, 11 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 4 in., $450/SOLD
Leslie Hinton, Jurassic Head Dress, 2013
earthenware, underglazes and glazes,
12 1/2 x 6 1/2 x 5 in., $600
Leslie Hinton, Four Legs, One Thought, 2013,
Earthenware, underglazes and glazes 
$600/SOLD
Leslie Hinton, Miss Plumbago, 2013, 
earthenware, underglazes, glazes, acrylic 
and prismacolor, 16 x 5 x 3.5 in., $600

Leslie Hinton, Didn't Quite Work Otherwise
2013, earthenware, underglazes, glazes, acrylic, 
prismacolor and wire, 9 x 10.5 x 4 in., $350

EDWARD RICE Fortress Series Essay: Ed Rice Uses Cinnabar Green

            ED RICE USES CINNABAR GREEN
            By Wim Roefs

            Early 1960s
            Patrick W. Rice and Jane Barnes Rice take son Edward to see 18th-century Fort Frederica on St. Simons Island, Ga., which strikes the young King Arthur/pirates aficionado as a real, authentic place.

            Early 1990s
            Edward Rice, well into a career defined strongly by painting vernacular Southern architecture, returns to Fort Frederica, taking pictures.

            2012
            Edward Rice wonders what to paint next, finds a slide of Fort Frederica on his studio floor, declares “I’ll do that!” and – having painted a fig tree 20-plus times in the late 1980s and a barn almost as often in 2007–2008 – takes serial painting to a new level with 50 paintings along with drawings and monotypes. “I didn’t mean to paint that many,” he would comment later.

            2014
            Edward Rice, prior to exhibiting 47 paintings, four monotypes and three sepia drawings of Fort Frederica at if ART Gallery, Columbia, S.C., says:
            “I wanted to do something more symbolic, not so site specific as I usually do, even though it is a specific site. I wanted an ambiguous surrounding. Therefore, the background is dark in many paintings. Dramatic. Like theatrical lighting. I painted it more like a model on stage rather than a real place. No bricks. It looks like a chess piece. All that’s left of the actual building is the façade, and I was intrigued by that as well – just a façade, like a stage set.”
            “Usually when I depict a particular building or architectural detail, I decide on format and scale. This time, I had a couple of square canvases, and that seemed the wrong shape. So I stretched the building, wider. In other paintings, I stretched it taller. To give them distinct personalities. In the end I was using that motif to riff off of, so to speak. Big, small, acrylic, oil, cheap paint, square, vertical, different ways of painting, canvas, panel. Just to see what effects I could get.”
            “Maybe I am just making this up, but perhaps I am trying to assume different personas, breaking out of the way I usually paint and do things differently here and there. It showed me that I can do some things that I haven’t been doing. My goal is to be a better painter.”
            “I was experimenting with what was laying around. Lots of the small paintings are all about the color of the paint, to see what it would do. I am not so sharp on the qualities of color, how color works. I usually approach things more tonally and by dealing with the effects of light. But these paintings are less observation-based. These are more in my mind’s eye.”
            “I even used colors I had never used, like cinnabar green. Someone had given me that, and I thought I would never use it. Then I did a whole painting with it. A small one.”
           
                                                                              Wim Roefs is the owner of if ART Gallery


           Edward Rice: Bio

            North Augusta, S.C., native Edward Rice (b. 1953) is one of the Southeast’s most prominent contemporary painters. The Augusta, Ga., resident has had solo museum exhibitions at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, twice; the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C.; the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, S.C.; the Chattahoochee Valley Art Museum in La Grange, Ga.; and the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C. Rice also was represented in The Story of the South: Art and Culture, 1890 – 2003, the inaugural exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. Rice’s paintings are included in museums, corporate and private collections throughout the Southeast and beyond. Solo exhibition catalogues about his work include Preservation of Place: The Art of Edward Rice (2011) and Edward Rice: Recent Monotypes (2003), published by the Morris Museum; Edward Rice: Architectural Works, 1978-1998 (1998) and Edward Rice: Tree Paintings (1990), by the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Augusta; Edward Rice: Paintings and Drawings (1987), by the McKissick Museum; Edifice Complex: New Paintings by Edward Rice (2013), by The Fire House Gallery, Louisville, Ga.; and Edward Rice: Paintings 1996 – 2008 (2008), by if ART Gallery in Columbia, S.C.