We are pleased to announce a wonderful turn out to Friday night’s opening of “Timeless Remnants” featuring abstract artworks by MAYA FREELON ASANTE, GA GARDNER & CHOICHUN LEUNG. Many thanks to Michael O’Sullivan and the Washington Post for highlighting the exhibition at “Gallery Opening of the Week” in their Friday, September 26, 2014 edition!
GA Gardner, So You, 65″x42″, mixed media on mylar
MFA is excited to introduce new mixed media on mylar artworks by GA GARDNER. In his work, the artist integrates media content to explore intercultural experience through the lens of his Caribbean heritage.
About GA GARDNER’s Artwork:
We are often exposed to dazzling amounts of print media in our daily lives. Many of us are engulfed by this information, from which it is almost impossible to unplug or tune out. This continuous stream of media is alluring, powerful, and even seductive to most but often not inclusive of diverse cultures; placing popular news over more important issues.
Through the lens of his Caribbean heritage, GA Gardner’s work uses the media content to create an intimate viewpoint of his intercultural experience. He dissects, covers up, reveals, layers, and re-contextualizes the material in the print publications he uses, to construct pieces that specifically discuss issues of politics, race, culture, and identity.
The publications are a natural fit for Gardner, as they offer random vibrant color pallets, much like that of a typical Caribbean environment, and a great mixture of text and professionally photographed images. However the colors are universal and allow a conceptual approach to finding the common ground among all cultures. The artist combines these media depictions and information with natural paper and synthetic materials to aid in his message. By deconstructing the images into strips, or bits of torn paper, and assigning new overlays of unifying colors to the materials, Gardner erodes the original content at various levels often reducing them to shades with traces of random colors. He also incorporates urban western grit, geometric African lines, contemporary images, and borrowed African and indigenous weaving techniques to create unified montage of textures.
The image that was once a bold headline new banner, or the newest eye catching product now struggles to be seen; muted, it now plays a secondary role to layers of paint and other mediums. The resulting serendipitous visual construction is an unsystematic reconfiguration and repurposing to discuss culture, heritage and the symbolism of color.
Please contact Morton Fine Art for available artwork by this wonderful artist.
mortonfineart@gmail.com
(202) 628-2787
Artist CHARLES WILLIAMS launches new monoprint etchings and drawings from his series “Swim”.
About “Swim”:
Charles Williams, Air Forces, 9″x6″, etching
Charles Williams, Young King, 9″x6″, graphite on paper
Charles Williams, Cortez, 9″x6″, etching on paper
Charles Williams, Concord, 9″x6″, etching
Congratulations to Morton Fine Art’s KATHERINE HATTAM for her 24 September, 2014 opening of Backwaters at the La Trobe University Museum of Art in Australia.
OPENING: Wednesday 24th of September at 6pm.
To be opened by Cathy Leahy,
Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings, NGV
Katherine Hattam’s new series of works, Backwaters, examines the relationship between minor waterways and the sites in which they are situated, exploring how they have shaped the history and character of the diverse cities in which they exist; the Merri Creek in Melbourne, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and the Suzhou Creek in Shanghai. The resulting woodblocks, prints and collages reveal intriguing similarities between these disparate locations and the people who use them. Despite radically divergent national frameworks, each of these waterways share the power of perceived obscurity and the insignificance, disguising their important histories and places of cultural exchange.
Exhibition runs 22 September – 7 November
Curated by Anita La Pietra
LUMA | LA Trobe University Museum of Art
Glenn College, Kingsbury Drive
Bundoora Campus 3086
Mon – Fri 10am to 5pm
The Speed of Light: paintings by William Mackinnon.
William Mackinnon’s landscape paintings portray the Australian terrain and the road laid upon it with ebullience, wonder and whispers, perhaps, of terror.
The artist makes paintings you can almost inhabit.
Mackinnon’s vision of the rural parcels around Melbourne captures the vastness of his domain in manners both terrestrial and emotional. But movement and displacement abound in his pictures too, conveying temporal urgency with stunning effect.
In day-lit long-range views of wooded cliffs along the sea, and racy snap shots from nocturnal car rides wrought with dazzling painterly invention and compositional risk, Mackinnon suggests the notion that the extraordinary abounds in the mundane and that the search for a perfect wave is not unlike the struggle to make a perfect work of art.
WILLIAM MACKINNON, “Crossroads”
In Shoreham, 2013, imposing forests with trees like prison bars occlude the vista of a distant and lonesome cove flecked with hooded surfers, waiting for sets. The effect is both resplendent and chilling. In another work, Crossroads, 2013, headlights illuminate a solitary house, poised inches from a lost highway in an instant of hysterical oddness: this looming ghost house with Christmas lights dangling pell-mell, battered fence posts and a sad, leaning tree, all coming into garish focus across the windshield of the car you, the viewer, are driving. Conflicting, loaded messages abound here: is this a place to rest? Is this a place to die? Menace and welcome in equal measure; light and darkness showing and obscuring in equal measure.
These are key players in Mackinnon’s output: menace and welcome. His pictures read beautifully as maps of specific places and actual experiences but also speak so clearly to the universality of travel itself, with its conflicting emotions, drama and surprise. Many of his paintings are made from the perspective of a car’s driver, often at night, and the theme of locomotion, of movement itself, becomes a central one. Other times, the view is set back, almost idyllic: looking to the distance, through the trees at a possible destination. But the view is always interrupted by foregrounding trees and swooping valleys, larded with colorful, abundant distraction.
To move into the world is to find oneself elsewhere, redefined perhaps, by a new setting or a new set of circumstances. This is the backbone of travel and adventure and a wellspring for Mackinnon’s imagery. But he also courts this investigation and its potential prizes (and pitfalls) by taking risks with his compositions and handling his materials loosely. After all, the process of creating the painting is as much a journey as anything and Mackinnon clearly likes to go places. His paintwork recalls the fast and furious additive technique of current Euro uber-kunstlers Peter Doig and Daniel Richter but there’s also a joie-de-vivre in Mackinnon’s color that smacks more lovingly of David Hockney or even Henri Matisse. All are artists who’ve sought to advance their craft in terms personal and historical and here again Mackinnon is fighting the good fight: he’s done the reading and wrung his hands in the miasma of heady critical theory: studying in London (a bristling Art World capital) and completing a residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa Texas, (an American Mecca for the worship of Minimalism). But these scholarly experiences inform the work quietly. Mackinnon has an obvious gift for grand presentation and clearly wishes the work to speak for itself. It does.
The Dark.
Strange things happen in the dark and it’s the darkness that permeates many of Mackinnon’s best paintings. Mackinnon allows the dark real primacy. In his landscapes, blackened areas abound; often dominating his compositions and offering juicy counterpunches to the light-filled and boisterous passages where content is visible and real. In the blast of his headlights, the road dazzles with reflective markers, swooping passing-lane stripes and glowing, orange panels with arrows indicating a hard left turn to come. But beyond that, beyond the turn, utter blackness. The Void. Inky, fathomless expanses abut his lit areas with such sheer tension as to suggest potential doom or potential bliss. It becomes clear that these blackened fields are not really empty at all. No, Mackinnon’s “empty” spaces behave with all the fecund possibility – of bounty, of menace – that the imagination dares to ignite. Look into the dark spaces and there is nothing to “see” there, nothing is rendered, and yet all is perceptible. The dark stares right back at us, pregnant with the scary shit we cannot see. So while there is pictorial absence – blankness, depth, openness, what painters call “negative space” – this is also fertile acreage for great emotional density, as the viewer can’t help but load the space with content, expectation and possibility. The anti-void is what it has become.
The lightness of being.
In brighter pictures, cast in daylight, Mackinnon delights in exhibiting what lies at the end of his rainbows: waves. Surf spots: just beyond reach, behind trees, over hills, mighty and majestic. Immense waves loom in monolithic arcs recalling Hokusai’s brilliant woodcuts. Verdant hills and valleys flecked with light, undulate in and out of shadow, not unlike the sea itself, sometimes pictured in the distance. In the surfing paintings, the great expanse of the ocean (often rendered in stunning, curdled pools of poured pigments, surfers bobbing) quickly replaces the blackness seen in the road paintings as a cauldron of possibility. Vistas are perceivable here but this is the Ocean, with its own mysterious territory, moods and forces. And as all surfers know, once you are out there anything, anything at all, can happen.
Alex Weinstein
Los Angeles, 2014
A huge congratulations to South African born artist, ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY for the acquisition of her wood engravings, “David”, “Astrocytes” and “David with Astrocytes” for the permanent collection of the Evergreen Museum and Library at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Images of her wood engravings can be found below as well as select images of her mixed media on panel columns which are also on view at the museum (by appointment).
Please contact Morton Fine Art for available artwork by ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY.
Rosemary Feit Covey, “David”, wood engraving
Rosemary Feit Covey, “Astrocytes”, wood engraving
Rosemary Feit Covey, “David with Astrocytes”, wood engraving
Rosemary Feit Covey at the Evergreen Museum, photo credit: Graham Scott
Crossing the Line : Rosemary Feit Covey Evergreen Museum catalog
Morton Fine Art: curator's notes 