Bryan Ricci

"I have always been interested in the way people in today’s fast-paced, high-tech culture perceive (or fail to perceive) their environment, with specific regard to nature and animals.  In other words, my paintings attempt to pose the question:  To what extent have we become physically, morally, and emotionally removed from our natural environments?  Is our day-to-day experience with nature perceived or real?  Also, how much of this separation is the effect of our obsession with technology?  

To examine these ideas in my newer work, (the series involving painted dots on photographs), I chose to synthesize a traditional medium of artistic expression (oil paint) with a technique that mimics the more modern pixelized images we see everyday on the internet and other media.  I started by photographing a landscape with a digital camera.  Then, I hand-pixelated an animal that I felt fit the scene, either realistically or ironically.  I wanted each piece to tell its own individual story. 

In all of my work, I am interested in bringing to light the ever-increasing disparities between the limited scope of our understanding of and experience with nature, (partly due to the replacement of the digital experience for what is real), and the enormity and timelessness of the natural world that goes unnoticed.  My paintings serve as a reminder of human ignorance and neglect, an invitation to look deeper, and a challenge to question and examine your own perceptions." -Bryan Ricci

Kevork Cholakian

Artist Statement:
" I have always been influenced by the Early Dutch Masters: the way they used color, light and shadow to create luminous still life paintings.  I choose to paint subject matter that is rich in color, texture and character of an imperfect nature. I use the juxtaposition of strong color against opposite or neutral tones to help focus full attention on each element in my work. Painting on smooth surfaces in transparent layers helps me to create subtle variations of color, luminosity and realism. Color is a central focus. Simplicity and clarity are my primary goals. "

Christopher L. Mercier

 

 On his project: 

“Color {Space} Form” is a creative exploration into the depiction of pictorial, sculptural and architectural space.  At its heart, it posits, through an act of making, a vision of contemporary space. Within Western thought there is a long tradition of spatial development & exploration.  From the early middle ages, through the Renaissance and up to the modern time, each era’s depiction/construction of space becomes a world or window into how experience is perceived. In today’s global world, collapsed time, virtual reality, reality T.V. and the internet all weave a “new immediacy” where these developments act as cues in the shaping of contemporary space.  My investigations into pictorial, cultural and physical space collectively seek an understanding of the effects, opportunities, and outcomes these and other cues have on contemporary spatial expression and its development.

Tim Anderson

 

" These paintings are about people and events that have come into my world through reading, research and coincidence.  The paintings are part of an exploration of human drama – all of them.  Not so much good and evil, but the gray spaces in between.  To get this down in paint is to trace a trajectory through a fascinating and compulsive intoxicating need to know.  It is a way of laying it all out, where the process of making the marks is equally important than the end result."

Lisa Adams

Lisa Adams is a painter and public artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.  Ms. Adams graduated with a B.A. in Painting from Scripps College in Claremont, California and received her M.F.A. from the Claremont Graduate University.
 
She is the recipient of a Fulbright Professional Scholar Award, a Brody Arts Fund Fellowship and a Durfee ARC Grant. Her work is in the collections of Eli Broad, The Frederick Weisman Museum and the Laguna Museum of Art.

 

Norman Bluhm

Bluhm was born in 1921 in Chicago, Illinois. From 1936-4, he studied architecture with Mies van der Rohe at Armour Institute of Technology (later Illiniois Institute of Technology). He studied in Italy and lived in Paris. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux arts in France and after a divorce, returned to New York city. He died in 1999.

John Humble

John Humble received a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Maryland and an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. His large-scale color photographs of the ironies and paradoxes of the Los Angeles landscape have been exhibited and published internationally. His work is in numerous collections including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the National Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institute, the Library of Congress, LACMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Nicki Stager

"In the darkroom I paint with light. There is no camera; rarely are there negatives. Over the past seven years I have been making images on the threshold between photography and painting. Many viewers question whether the finished work may even be called photographic. Originally, the plan for this body of work was to explore light defined by line, space, form, and color; but recently the project has evolved beyond that. Surprisingly, the images have taken on emotional characteristics that seem difficult for many viewers to articulate. People tend to be drawn to the images, but they are not sure why. Therefore, as I continue to explore new technical possibilities I am now consciously directing the emotional impact of the color in my work. The work begins as a 3"x 3" unique chromogenic photographic print produced in the darkroom. They can be made only once, and are the originals for larger prints (c-prints) made by doing high resolution scans, which are eventually printed at 12" x 12" and 30" x 30".

Eric LoPresti

Born 1971 in Denver Colorado, Eric LoPresti grew up in the desert of southeastern Washington State. Eric received a BA in Cognitive Science from the University of Rochester in 1993 and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2002. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious Miami Young Painters Award, which was followed by a solo show at Miami University (OH).

Recent New York exhibitions include Test Sites at the New York Public Library, Force Against Force at Like the Spice Gallery, and Against Nature at Jan Larsen Fine Art. Eric's current series of diptychs juxtaposes photorealistic renderings of aerial landscapes with abstract color gradients.

Eric lives and works in Brooklyn, and practices Aikido at New York Aikikai.

Treasure Frey

"Ms. Frey’s most recent body of work focuses on small slices of color, a visible translation of a specific energy. Influenced by particles, waves, atoms, and organisms, Treasure's conservation of matter forces all of these elements to act in concert, revealing formal visual decisions to form their own microcosms, macrocosms. In these obssessionalist collages Treasure considers, cuts, lays her gouache and acrylic, tapes, and then begins again; her process is a cycle in which the critical mass occurs again. Each singular unit of her energy and color act together to form a machine which, when whole, commands a greater and more powerful place than before"

Anya Gallaccio

Anya Gallaccio studied at the Kingston Polytechnic, London, UK and Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, UK. She currently lives and works in San Diego, CA. Her works are made from a wide range of materials, mostly derived from nature. Gallaccio's work is primarily concerned with nature, beauty and decay, often using ephemeral materials with which she references the cyclic nature of life and death. The works' multi-sensory and experimental aspects allow the viewer to engage with the rich tactile elements as well as the conceptual grounding of each piece. The works are often in a permanent state of flux, and are displayed in a variety of settings.  

Michael Flohr

Michael Flohr is a young California artist, currently living and working in San Diego where he was born and raised. Flohr's work is a visual adventure. Not only in its exquisite beauty, obvious artistic integrity and the emotion elicited in every work of art, but in the artist's ability to effect the invention of a genre unique and true in and of itself in today's contemporary art world. Depicting ordinary moments in extraordinary ways, Flohr's work is an intellectually artistic mastery of color, perspective, technique and vision.

Alex Wood

 

Manchester Polytechnic, BA Graphic Design. 1988.Born in Essex in 1966, Alex Wood spent his first five years in Canada before returning to the United Kingdom and settling in a quiet Manchester suburb. During six years of Art School, studying Graphic Design and Photography, Wood became part of the Manchester underground music scene throughout the 1980's and 1990's. After a year divided between Paris and Milan Wood returned to Manchester and began creating Street Art, choosing stencils for the immediate result they gave.

Jeanne Silverthorne

Jeanne Silverthorne currently lives and works in New York City. She was born in 1950 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1971, she received her BA from Temple University in Philadelphia. She proceeded to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She then received her MA from Temple University and completed her coursework for her Ph.D from Temple University. She mainly works with rubber in order to create various works of art including sculptures and installations.

Noah Davis

Noah Davis creates a uniquely personal narrative in his psychologically charged paintings by sourcing imagery from found photographs, art history and autobiographical events. At once a storyteller, a surrealist and an astute social commentator, he often represents the quiet, forgotten moments in American history. His work typically deals with social or political issues.

Swoon

Swoon is a Brooklyn-based street artist who creates life-sized portraits of people she meets, using woodcut block prints and paper cutouts. Swoon’s galleries are city walls, often in the environments that inspired the prints. With influences ranging from German Expressionist wood block prints to Indonesian shadow puppets, Swoon is a master of using cut paper to play with positive and negative space in a conceptually driven exploration of street environments.
 

Emily Henretta

Emily Henretta graduated from Columbia with a BA in History in 2004 and has completed a residency at the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited at the International Print Center New York and at Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ.

Ben Schonzeit

Ben Schonzeit is a painter who primarily uses acrylic paint in order to create vibrant, photorealism paintings. 

Ryan McGinness

“McGinness has knocked the stuffing out of the spare, modernist white-cube concept of a gallery and filled it with his own brand of art: ornate, jazzy pop visions that spring as much from graffiti and corporate logos as they do from art history.”—Boston Globe 

“McGinness has mastered and integrated a seemingly infinite variety of visual languages, producing works that inhabit the ever-blurred border between high art and popular illustration.”—Art Forum 

Mary Manusos

Mary Manusos was born in San Diego , California . Studied at San Diego State University , then at University of Wisconsin at Madison . She has been creating art for almost four decades and has had numerous single artist shows, juried shows and has received nine grants. She has written numerous books including d'Art Objects and Woman's Self Image. Her work is in the numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art , Tweed Museum , Cleveland Museum , and the Library of Congress.