CLAIRE BURBRIDGE
Mycelium Universe #2, 2014
Archival ink
on paper
43 x 43 inches framed
shooting the moon in the eye
April 25 – July 26, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday, April 25, 5-8:00 pm
John
Ashbery
Claire
Burbridge
Matthew
Picton
Trenton
Doyle Hancock
James Hill
Sarah McEneaney
Shinique
Smith
Alison
Elizabeth Taylor
Trevor
Winkfield
William
T. Wiley
I think we were
just celebrating
being
alive.
that small room
full of smoke and
music and
voices,
night after night
after
night
the poor, the mad,
the lost.
The
freewheeling spirit of this passage from the poem shooting the moon in
the eye by Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) suggests a point of departure
for this exhibition of ten contemporary artists curated by Michael Solway. A diverse array of more than 40 recent works
in painting, collage, drawing and assemblage will be included. As idiosyncratic and difficult to categorize as
these artists may be, their work shares several common threads, most notably a
sense of narrative or storytelling, references to the figure that may be
literal or oblique, and an astonishing attention to rich texture, detail and
sometimes riotous color.
The
painters Sarah McEneaney, Trevor Winkfield and Alison Elizabeth Taylor comprise
the most representational and figurative end of the spectrum. McEneaney’s egg-tempera tableaux depict her
domestic environment. Taylor
has become well known for reinvigorating the
Renaissance craft of marquetry,
or intarsia wood inlay, in creating highly realistic
imagery. Recently, after working within the boundaries
of the limited palette afforded by natural woods, she now mashes marquetry and
paint in unprecedented ways. Trevor Winkfield combines absurdist and
unpredictable juxtapositions of disparate images, all rendered in a flat
graphic Pop Art style. His paintings
hint at narratives, although they can also be read as constructed abstractions
with recognizable objects worked into the compositions.
Shinique
Smith’s sculptures and paintings, composed of fabric and cast off clothing, are
perhaps the most abstract, although the sculptures composed with twisted clothing
intrinsically suggest a connection to the human form.
Personal
mythologies and sweeping cultural observation inform the prodigious works of
William T. Wiley and Trenton Doyle Hancock.
Spanning a career of more than five decades, Wiley’s work encompasses
painting, sculpture, printmaking, film and performance. His densely layered paintings incorporate
superb draftsmanship with sly puns and other bits of fragmentary text
addressing important social, political and environmental issues of the
times. His work is included in prominent
public and private collections worldwide.
Trenton Doyle Hancock’s widely exhibited and collected prints, drawings,
collaged-felt paintings and site-specific installations tell the story of the “Mounds”,
a group of mythical creatures inhabiting a fantastic, invented landscape who
are the protagonists in the artist’s unfolding narrative. His works are suffused with personal
mythology presented on an operatic scale.
A 20-year survey of his drawings opens in April at the Contemporary Arts
Museum Houston.
Cultural
observation also plays an import role in Matthew Picton’s elaborate sculptures
made from cut and folded paper. He
constructs cartographic city plans and layers the walls with text and visual fragments
unique to the history of the particular city.
His constructions are sometimes circular and always involve complex
street networks. This attraction to the
circular form and creation of complex networks is shared by Claire Burbridge,
who makes highly detailed ink drawings of mushrooms and other natural elements
from her Northwest Coast habitat.
John
Ashbery is one of this country’s best-known poets and is the author of more
than twenty books. He is also well known
for his art criticism and collaborations with visual artists. This exhibition will feature his paper collages. Since the early 1980s, James Hill has been
making collage based constructions utilizing such wide ranging sources and
materials as appropriated images taken from Italian or French cinema, meticulously
woven fabric, printed texts from American Civil War oral histories and often
humorous observations about art history.
John
Ashbery (b.1928, lives in New York
City)
Claire
Burbridge (b. 1971, London, lives in
Ashland, Oregon)
Matthew
Picton (b. 1960, London, lives in
Ashland, Oregon)
Trenton
Doyle Hancock (b.
1974, Oklahoma City, lives in Houston)
James Hill (b.1947, East Texas, lives in San
Clemente, CA)
Sarah
McEneaney (b.1955, Munich, Germany, lives
in Philadelphia)
Shinique
Smith (b.1971,
Baltimore, Maryland, lives Hudson, NY)
Alison
Elizabeth Taylor (b.
1973, Selma, Alabama, lives in Brooklyn)
Trevor
Winkfield (b.1944,
Leeds, England, lives in New York City)
William
T. Wiley (b.1937, Bedford, Indiana,
lives in Woodacre, CA)
Charles
Bukowski, shooting the moon in the eye,
from The Last Night of
The Earth Poems,
1992, published by Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa, CA.
