Tag Archives: mixed media

Soledad Salamé

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Grotto (1994)
Grotto (1994)
Garden of the Sacred Light (1994)
Garden of the Sacred Light (1994)
In the Labyrinth of Solitude (2001) (detail)
Amber River (Tryptich) (2004)
Time Suspended (2004) (detail)
Viper (2005)
Where Do You Live? (2009) (detail)
Where Do You Live? (2009) (detail)
Gulf Distortions (2011)
Gulf Distortions (2011)
Brooklyn Bridge (2013)
Brooklyn Bridge (2013)
Territories Series: Craters, Nevada (2013)
Atacama in Red (2017)
Ice (2018)
Antarctica (2019) 
Still White (2019)
Turning Blue (2019)

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—images courtesy of Goya Contemporary and the artist—

Artist’s Statement

 

My art is a conceptual and visual exploration of the intersection of science, technology, and social justice issues defining the age in which we live. Engaged with the political implications of environmental issues, my recent work maps vulnerable marginalized communities suffering the greatest consequences of natural disasters.

Working in glass, silk, and paper effectively extended my visual vocabulary, incorporating textual relief elements to underscore collective negligence regarding climate change, including rapid melting of glaciers and polar ice caps. Climate change has triggered people’s migration from areas affected by rising water and unstable weather. In the USA, Border security policies intensify the social impact of migration, exacerbating unsustainable environmental practices.

Our world is in a constant flux and transformation. The way we communicate our actions’ consequences has been transformed. We once created a tactile object – a newspaper — providing a richly physical interaction made from plant-based paper; today, with the slow death of print media, we interact with world news through digital reporting, easily distorted or manipulated.

I wish to record this change as a call to action to protect both the earth’s precious natural resources and its people, while pointing to the fragile beauty surrounding us. By magnifying the pleasures inherent in natural materials — paper, textiles, and even sand-based glass – my work seeks to remind us of the magnificence and splendor that may be lost if we do not protect the environment.

Soledad Salamé, American, was born in Santiago, Chile in 1954. She currently lives and works
in Baltimore, Maryland, where she directs Sol Print Studio, an experimental space for artists to develop and refine their printmaking skills.

 

From 1973 to 1983 Salamé lived and studied in Venezuela. During this time she was exposed to the rainforest, a pivotal experience in her artistic development. As an interdisciplinary artist, Salamé creates work that originates from extensive research of specific environmental and human rights topics. In the pursuit of new ideas, she has conducted intensive field research in the Americas, and Antarctica.

Her work has been presented at multiple venues, Baltimore Museum of Art, Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD. Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; Denver Museum of Art, CO; Miami Art Museum, FL; El Museo Del Barrio, NY; The Women Museum, Washington DC; and the Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile.

Salamé’s work is represented in private and public collections internationally, including The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, The Baltimore Museum of Art. Her work is included in The Contemporary Museum, 20 Years, by Irene Hoffman, Latin American Women Artists of the United States, by Robert Henkes and Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century, by Edward J. Sullivan.

Dee Shapiro

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  • It’s Covid Everywhere
    (2020)
  • From Whence it Came
    (2020)
  • Test, Isolate, Trace (2020)
  • My Venus, Reborn (2019)
  • Convoluted Torso (2017)
  • My Bather (2021)
  • Organelles (2018)
  • Whether or Not (2015)
  • What Was I Thinking (2015)
  • My Dream (2020)
  • My Olympia (2018)

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Artist’s Statement

 

As in a dream of alternative realities, absurd connections, or on a trip passing familiar landscapes in unfamiliar settings, new conscious and unconscious associations are brought to a 2-dimensional surface in my work. In the recent pieces, geometry (seen even in the structure of organic forms) directs composition: arbitrary drops of color undermine control and create shapes that succumb to the overwork of drawings, rendering obsessive intricacies and paint application building the forms. Collage material adds extraneous influences in a subtle blend.

In the beginning was pattern. First the Fibonacci progression color coded on graph paper, followed by a series of work that included architectural elements off the grid. With all the work, always color, a nod to the Albers studies. A redirection to small horizontal paintings of the geometry in cities and landscapes ensued for a number of years.

Missing the early fascination and engagement with pattern led to more recent work exploring evocative biological and organic forms, the evolution of which is the more recent work as well as borrowing from sources that include other artist’s work in a collaborative effort.

Another direction takes me to appropriate iconic paintings of women by well-known artists in the past and to rework those images in pattern with paint, ink and mixed media.

Always a continuum in my current practice is the exploration of pattern wherever it appears in other sources and cultures as well as imagined and combined.

In this newest body of work, I am unflinchingly forging ahead to newly wrought terrain with the underlying echoes of the beginnings.

Featured in the Pattern and Decoration exhibit at PS I, Dee Shapiro has exhibited in New York and elsewhere since the late 1970’s, with solo and group exhibitions at AIR, Andre Zarre Gallery, Everson Museum, Nassau County Museum, David Richard Gallery, Bernay Fine Art and many other galleries and museums in the US and abroad. Her work is in the collections of the S.R. Guggenheim Museum, Heckscher Museum, Albright Knox Gallery, Birmingham Museum, William Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection, and other university, corporate, and private collections.

 

A painter who also writes and makes artists’ books, Shapiro’s practice explores the intersection of pattern, nature and geometry. Her imagery is borrowed and imagined from weaving, beading and the crafts of other cultures, as well as biomorphic forms overlapping within each individual piece. She employs a variety of media and has produced several bodies of work including systemic patterning, city and landscapes, prints and large figurative mixed media pieces. She has been teaching art history and studio art at Empire State College, SUNY, and Old Westbury, NY.

Judith Henry

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Artist’s Statement

For almost 50 years I have created conceptual multimedia artworks exploring the friction between our interior lives and public selves. I have secretly observed, listened to, photographed, filmed and recorded strangers in public places while remaining largely invisible. When using myself as subject, I have appeared masked or hidden, as in several recent series.

After graduating Carnegie Mellon, I moved to New York from the suburbs of Cleveland and found myself in a densely populated metropolis. For me, each person was a matchless original as well as a stereotype. In 1970, with a small, cheap camera, I began surreptitiously photographing people on the streets, often listening to their conversations. In an attempt to tease out patterns of human experience, I aggregated thousands of photographs.

For years, I repurposed my street photographs in many forms: books, videos, photographs, installations and sculptures, and even created Who I Saw in New York from 1970-2000, a book and gallery installation consisting of photographs of thousands of people.

When I moved from SoHo to Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2008, I became dependent on the L train to visit Manhattan. This made it easy to go to galleries, museums, visit friends, see doctors, etc. I now found myself in close quarters with a vast and, for me, new, population. As a pastime, I began photographing other passengers with my iPhone. At the same time, I continued my art in the studio by developing several series of myself behind masks.

In 2017, it was announced that the L train would be closed for 18 months for repairs. What would this mean? How would my life be affected? Would my work practice change? It would not, but the focus, the idea would have a different urgency. I decided to start a new project, painting portraits of the passengers I had photographed. With free, quick, gestural strokes and a palette of both muted and intense colors, I tried to bring life to the gray underground. The speed of my painting reflected, for me, the crowded, ever-moving population of passengers; hurried, contemplative, sometimes angry, occasionally musical and lyrical. Almost half a million of us would be dislocated or stranded every day.

Underground became integrated with above ground. Everywhere I walked, construction crossed my paths. I photographed my altered landscape. The images became backgrounds on which I mounted several of the portraits. This recombination created context which has always been crucial to my art practice. I called the series L Train Bye, Bye. But then, overnight, everything seemed about to change. The governor had somehow discovered a new technology at the last minute. No shutdown, he said. No fast track. But my work would stand with a new title, They Rode the L Train.

Judith Henry is a multi-media artist, born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. After receiving a BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University, she moved to New York in the late 1960s and started making art that explored the friction between interior life and public persona, developing themes of self-disclosure, identity and loss. She utilizes drawing, photography, typography, video, painting and sculpture. Several of her works resulted in large installations. In addition to exhibiting internationally for decades, in 1976 Henry and artist Jaime Davidovich created Wooster Enterprises, whose conceptual paper products were sold internationally. Her conceptual Crumpled Paper Stationery was produced and sold by The Museum of Modern Art for years. MoMA also commissioned her to produce Overheard on the Way to MoMAQNS when they closed the 53rd Street museum for renovation and temporarily moved to Queens. Judith Henry’s Overheard book series was published by Universe/Rizzoli from 2000 to 2002 and in 2006 Atria Books published her Overheard in America. Henry has shown in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Cleveland, Philadelphia and internationally in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, London and Switzerland. Her most recent solo shows were at BravinLee programs, New York, 2015 and 2018, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2016 and The National Arts Club 2017.

Karen Hampton

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Artist’s Statement

I am a conceptual mixed media artist, addressing issues of colorism and race. I seek to break stereotypes and address issues related to my life. My artwork is steeped in oral history and is an expression of the narrative. As a storyteller, I impart conceptualized stories about the “other” in society. I view myself as a vehicle for ancestral stories to transcend history and remain part of the historical record. The canvas of my artwork is fabric which I age and imbue with conceptualized images of a forgotten part of the American story. Using images and text, I embed the cloth with the hopes and visions of my ancestors, particularly those whose stories have remained invisible. Whether woven or stitched, every time my weft crosses the warp or my needle pierces the cloth, it reaches through another layer of scorched earth that slavery has left behind. In this way I attempt to reframe critical issues of race.

Karen Hampton (born January 28, 1958, in Los Angeles, California) is an African American conceptual mixed-media artist addressing issues related to race. She was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2000 from the University of California, Davis. In 2008, she received the Fleishhacker Foundation’s Eureka Award. Her artwork is exhibited internationally and is in the collection of the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum and the Honolulu Museum of Art. Currently, she holds the position of Designer in Residence at Michigan State University in Critical Race Issues.

Carl Heyward

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Artist’s Statement

Paying attention need not be a stress but a meditative process; an observation of the elements of existence viewed openly and with equanimity, neither exalting or diminishing the value of things as they are or present themselves; the value of the story intrinsic to their combinations and juxtapositions resonating in ways hopefully poignant and new.

…Like a movie we walked into the middle of … ours is a fragmented existence, cobbled together; challenging a perspective both flawed and poetic, toward an approximate accuracy that seeks to define and reconcile so-called reality; a facsimile of earnest truth, a rapid-fire cyber information glut combined with old-guard pulp and electronic media hustle on religio-politico pulpit bearing news of new opportunities in the greed and self-aggrandizement market. Distance is the philosophy, acquisition is the sutra that ties it all together… what’sa matter you? … memory is unreliable … so these cultural ghosts and hallucinations are nailed to the gallery cross for veneration, contemplation, or possible exorcism, as you will.

Carl Heyward is an artist and writer from San Francisco, the founder of Global Art Project, and a workshop facilitator in the US, Mexico, and Italy. His workshops are highly attended sessions of hands-on
investigations in painting, collage, print making and artists’ books for creative people of all levels of experience. He is a mixed-media artist whose recent or upcoming exhibitions include UNLEASHED GALLERY (California), GAP : SF INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL (“Dada Here and Now”), GAP: ROOM ART GALLERY” By Collaboratve Means” (Mill Valley, California), THE FOURTH WALL GALLERY (Oakland California), GAP: CARLOS BUELNA GALLERY@MUSEO DE ARTE MODERNO DE MAZATLAN (Mazatlan, Mexico), and 10dence GALLERY “Poligious Issues” (Rotterdam, Netherlands), 2017.

Sarah Slavick

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Artist’s Statement

My paintings are abstracted interiors of the body made of cells, neurons, blood, milk, veins, wounds, and sutures. They are the stuff of regeneration, of connection, of disease and ultimately of recovery. The visual formal language is one of abstract evocations rather than depictions, but derives from and is inspired by celebrations and lamentations of the social and physical experiences of humanity. The beauty of painting is that it can communicate profoundly and may reflect upon human history. While my paintings are informed by such tragedies as AIDS and joyous events like birth, I do not desire or aim for any specific reading or interpretation. Instead, the works offer multiple possibilities.

With climate change an ever pressing concern, and rising seas, water scarcity, ocean pollution, and other extreme weather patterns becoming the norm, I find myself looking to the vast expanses of water as a source for my most recent body of work. While my work is abstract, I reference nature visually and conceptually. For instance, in the Phylum and other works, I reference cell biology, accretion of geological formations, botanical structures and the taxonomy of the natural world.

During the very physical work of additive and subtractive layering in my work, there are numerous conceptual and physical changes that occur. In past work, I created large wood paintings made up of grids of painted small panels which arose out of my own experience of motherhood and spoke to the sustenance of new life. Some work was also inspired by the miraculous feat of cell division into the journey of creation and birth of new life. More recently, I have made paintings containing hundreds of pieces of wood of various heights, widths, and lengths (as seen in Rime and Phylum). Each piece of wood or paper represents a separate entity but is linked with its surrounding neighbors by various systematic rules and decisions. The small singular elements of the multi-paneled pieces are meant to exist in equal strength to the whole. In effect, nothing is disconnected from the whole. The individual cannot exist without the support of the whole; but, nevertheless, it remains distinctly unique. The singular elements in all of these works ultimately change in form and substance by building into something greater than themselves. A transmutation occurs from part to the whole.

Sarah Slavick (b. Munich, Germany, 1958) received her BA in Studio Art from Wesleyan University and an MFA from Pratt Institute. Slavick received a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant in Painting in 2006, as well as grants from the Artist Resource Trust Fund, the Blanche Colman Foundation and residency fellowships at the Millay Colony, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, CAMAC in Marnay-sur-Seine, Kunstnarhuset Messen in Aalvik, Norway, and the Baer Art Center in Iceland. Her work has been exhibited in Big Bang! Abstract Painting for the 21st Century at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, at the Miller Block Gallery in Boston, Giola Gallery in Chicago, Tao Water Gallery in Provincetown and in Natural Acts at the Massachusetts Convention Center. Slavick has lectured about her work at Bowdoin College, the University of the Arts, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Studio Arts Center International in Florence, and the Maryland Institute of Art, among others. A member of a large family, she has five siblings, three of whom are also professional artists.

Don Porcaro

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Artist’s Statement

My work over time has consistently explored the nature of human interaction with the physical world through architecture and man-made objects. Tools, utensils, buildings and machines eventually become artifacts, archaeological sites and cultural signifiers. I have also been inspired by the whimsical possibilities inherent in animation and contemporary culture, from Japanese anime to the satirical figures of late Guston, which stand at the cusp of what I refer to as “the monster and the child,” something purely fictional and innocent that informs our youthful imagination.

My most current series entitled Talismans brings together many of these interests, with a focus on totemic iconography and the human form through stacked layers of limestone and marble. This layering alludes to the passing of geological time as well as cultural history, while the feet firmly place the sculptural form in the realm of abstracted figuration. Finally, the ornamental brass elements adorn the “heads,” making up a complex array of visual associations that bring to mind everything from Middle Eastern hookahs to Venetian perfume atomizers, Buddhist stupas and African jewelry.

Don Porcaro is a New York based artist and Professor of Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad including solo shows in New York, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Atlanta, and Nashville. A 10-year survey of his work has traveled from the University of Florida, Gainesville to the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota. He has also had museum shows at the Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz, NY, the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, MA, and The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit, NJ.