It’s not exactly that every artist draws/paints/sculpts landscape, it’s just that they turn from what they are doing occasionally, and escape to something they’re not doing enough. They’re relaxing. They’re “land escaping”. And that’s what we call this show.
The show consists of wall based works by 5 visual artists, a set of ceramic sculptures (by Maria Leon), and a series of animated computerized landscapes (by DA Ward).
Maria Leon
Space, of course is the inherent medium of Sculpture. By that we usually mean the cavities between between an arm and a thigh and how this relationship conveys altered and new information as the viewer circles and shifts their perceptual axis. But really no reason the original space conveying Art-form, should relinquish landscape and the Natural World to the deceptive two dimensional modes.
And on the subject of “deception”, why not “editorialize”- leave things out and put things in? After all, we are artists, here!
Andrew Kovner
It has been a long while since the painter with his/her brush and little bowl of colors has been the sole distributor of representations, of and from, distant unknown places. It can still be done, at least the activity. Call it quaint and certainly irrelevant to the mad dash. Art we think, is the hiatus from the “mad dash”, (and so it is – until it is not) “oh that I could be one!”[a perpetrator].
Freedom taken, Freedom granted, the amateur vs. the professional – but discipline all; and “on spec”.
The “hunter-gatherer” places the body and all those accoutrements, where others scatter like sunlight, meandering hither and yon – snapping imagery on smart phones of children in X-mas attire, often between the painter and the “object of desire”.
And so it goes, until the myopic choice, the slither of available perception, is beaten into “permanence “, to be exchanged at the public market place.
Gregory Liffick
Gregory Liffick has been making and exhibiting art for many years. He works mostly in the found object-assemblage medium. He is also a poet and a special education teacher. He is a member of Gallery 57 Underground.
His works for this show combine painting and frame together, into a kind of assemblage. When making them he started with the painting and then added the pieces for the frame, this sometimes requiring that the painting change to meld with the frame into a single cohesive work. The works that emerge comment on how he sees and feels about the world at that moment.
Mary Hughes
My work deals with layering processes that evoke a sense of wholeness, with oscillating harmonies of rhythm and the micro/macro cosmic similarities of natural order. Time and space layer as memories coalesce, recycle.. Flowing eddies of marbled paint offer a vast range of language to explore symbolizing outer reality and inner possibility.
I am interested in the topographical similarities found in paint, earth and figure. Intuition weaves conscious and subconscious processes into a unison. My work explores turbulence, chaos, and the emergence of primal creativity. In folded layers of paint, patterns of texture speak about different aspects of being. Metaphor and matter play, revealing states of reflection in the development of thoughts and feelings in psychological inner work. This structural complexity embraces individual, community and environment.
My images of women and hammocks are often interwoven with abstraction. The marks of abstract expressionism carry the energy of awakening existence .
Mike Vegas
Inspired by Cubism, I am fascinated by the idea of creating one picture made up of different viewpoints. Today's world of televisions, computers, and internet has become two billion viewpoints all vying for attention. Which ones do we pay attention to? Which ones are valid? How do I make sense of this?
I simplify everything to it's basic forms made up of lines, circles, and semi circles. Everything is a combination of these units, rhythms, and patterns. What is front? What is back? How do things exist on the picture plane? I want things to work in and out, over and under, as ambiguous as possible: a dance. No winners and losers, just participants. It's all illusion on top of another illusion. Pictures form and dissipate. Ideas come and go.
DA Ward
Walking one spring up the Mojave River canyon toward the hot springs, I was suddenly up to my ass in rattlesnakes. One beneath the rock I just stepped over, then as I was getting over that shock, I turned around, and two came slithering right off the bluff and onto the trail nearly at my feet.
Devout hippy that I was then, I did not take this lightly, but teared up and prayed, something like: “Mother Earth, don’t destroy us. We’re not very good stewards, but we aren’t trying to kill you. This civilization will soon be just another one of these layers along the trail side. A little burnt smell, lots of iron ore and strange trace minerals…”
Then I realized, the snakes weren’t trying to kill me. They were blind, just roused from winter hibernation, looking to slither down onto the warm dirt of the trail. Frightened silly by my sudden intrusion as I was of theirs. So we stood frozen there, under that warm spring sunlight, and thawed out together in the smell of chaparral, the luxuriant warmth, and the whirring silence. Then after about 15 or 20 minutes, they moved on, and I moved on.