CROSSROADS
A Solo Exhibition of Paintings by Australian Painter WILLIAM MACKINNON
October 24th, 2014 – November 14th, 2014
OPENING RECEPTION
Friday October 24th from 6pm-8pm
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Morton Fine Art is pleased to announce the second US exhibition of landscape paintings by internationally renowned Australian artist WILLIAM MACKINNON.
The exhibition will be on display from October 24th, 2014 through November 14th, 2014 at Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave NW, Washington, DC 20009. The opening reception will be held on Friday, October 24th from 6 to 8 pm.
Born in 1978 in Melbourne, Australia, WILLIAM MACKINNON earned his Bachelor of Arts from Melbourne University, his Masters of Visual Arts from Victorian College of the Arts and his Post Graduate Diploma from the Chelsea School of Art and Design in London. Exhibited heavily throughout Asia, Europe and Australia, Crossroads marks MACKINNON’s second solo exhibition in North America. MACKINNON is currently exhibiting as a finalist in theBasil Sellers Art Prize at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne. Born into a family legacy of internationally renowned fine artists, MACKINNON participate in a noteworthy 3 generation exhibition in Landscape of Longing: Shoreham 1950-2012 at the Mornington Pennisula Regional Gallery in Australia which included a number of works by his mother, KATHERINE HATTAM (b. 1950) and his grandfather, HAL HATTAM (b.1913 d.1994).
About CROSSROADS:
WILLIAM MACKINNON explores themes of Australian and personal identity in his solo exhibition, Crossroads. Existing at the intersection of representation and abstraction, reality and imagination, MACKINNON creates magical worlds of landscapes, nocturnes and dream scapes reflective of his internal and external environment. Employing mediums such as oil paint, solvent, enamel, and spray paint, MACKINNON’s landscapes evoke a mystery and richness in surface which parallel its psychological narrative content.
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm
Sunday 12pm – 5pm
WILLIAM MACKINNON & KATHERINE HATTAM: Landscape Of Longing
Contact Information
Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20009
(202) 628-2787
mortonfineart@gmail.com
www.mortonfineart.com
Australian Artist WILLIAM MACKINNON’s solo “Crossroads” at Morton Fine Art
31 Oct
Morton Fine Art at Aqua Art Miami 2014
30 Oct
Show Hours
Wednesday, December 3 | 3pm-10pm | VIP Opening Preview Party (for VIP pass holders)
Regular Fair Hours
Thursday, December 4 : 12pm – 9pm
Friday, December 5 : 11am – 9pm
Saturday, December 6 : 11am – 9pm
Sunday, December 7 : 11am – 6pm
Location
Aqua Art Miami – Aqua Hotel, 1539 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Aqua is located on Collins Ave, a short walk south of Art Basel Miami Beach, across from the Loews Hotel.
Morton Fine Art will be located in Suite 216.
Featured Artists
Maya Freelon Asante (North Carolina, b. USA)
Osi Audu (NYC, b. Nigeria)
Kesha Bruce (France, b. USA)
Ethan Diehl (Iowa, b. USA)
Victor Ekpuk (Washington, DC, b. Nigeria)
GA Gardner (Trinidad, b. Trinidad)
Katherine Hattam (Melbourne, b. Australia)
Choichun Leung (NYC, b. Wales)
William Mackinnon (Melbourne, b. Australia)
Nnenna Okore (Illinois, b. Nigeria)
Andrei Petrov (NYC, b. USA)
Stephon Senegal (Washington, DC, b. USA)
Vonn Sumner (Los Angeles, b. USA)
Charles Williams (North Carolina, b. USA)
Preview the work on the Morton Fine Art website: www.mortonfineart.com
mortonfineart@gmail.com, (202) 628-2787
“An Evening of Visual Awakening” – Special Event Photos at Morton Fine Art
22 Oct“An Evening of Visual Awakening” hosted by Naleli Askew, Audrey Johnson, Sheryl Scruggs, Tuesday, October 14, 2014 at Morton Fine Art Gallery, Washington, DC. Photo credits: DeJohn Davis Photography
A collaboration of creativity and design by three luxepreneurs was an experience curated for a select group of clients, associates and friends. Guest viewed the contemporary artwork exhibit featuring Artists Choichun Leung, Ga Gardner, and Maya Freelon Asante; and networked with art enthusiasts and collectors.
Hosts: Naleli Askew, Jewel Mine by Naleli, Audrey Johnson, AudreyLynnJo; and Sheryl Scruggs, Bronze Interiors
Gallery Owner: Amy Morton
Photographer: DeJohn Davis Photography
GA GARDNER interviewed on cultural identity in ART: Jamaica
21 Oct
What does Cultural Identity have to do with Abstraction?
Saturday, October 18, 2014
GA Gardner, So You, 65″x42″, mixed media on mylar
GA Gardner has recently returned to more regular artistic practice in Trinidad after years living and working in the U.S and launched a public project on Facebook called GetThru.org which functions as an artists think tank. He has also recently opened a show in Washington D.C. His work rests on the thin line between abstraction and reality or abstracted realities and has been described as a ‘cacophony of messages’ and information derived from mass media. He speaks with us about this work and its link to culture identity.
Art:Jamaica: The last time we spoke about your work you were making these collages which cut up source images and reformed them into figures in spaces. How have you made this transition to this newer work?
GA: This has not been a huge transition in the work; the mission and objective are the same. The pieces you are referring to were simply a more surreal approach to the same discussion and this body of work is more of an abstract approach. I have always looked at cultural identity in my work and it continues, but I wanted to speak to a larger audience – not be so specific – and I believe that abstract work has been the answer to this. I am able to discuss colors, lines, culture and contemporary materials without the limitations of figure and form. I can now approach my art in a more conceptual manner. The result is now an explosion of information that is woven together by cultural lines and tells a story about how a group of people are identified, ignored, or celebrated in the media. I continue to recycle what I and others can’t make use of in our daily lives. I often take the opportunity to use this material as the foundation for my exploration of color and texture. I love to see how random images can come together and tell a story of a particular time in history and how I can manipulate them to tell my story. I am trying to find myself in the colors and content to re-purpose the materials and to find a way to discuss topics as passionately as the media publishers’ materials are intent on doing.
Art:Jamaica: Your work draws these boundaries between abstraction and representation. What is your take on straddling this line? Can they both exist in the same space?
GA: Yes, they can and they often do. I went through a period where I was doing more representational work; I have not always been doing abstract. Now I am focusing on abstracts, but that does not mean that I won’t do some more representational work in the future. I don’t go with my feelings, I go with the message, then I decide on the medium and approach. I am passionate about color and the deconstruction of color–about lines and the complexity of patterns – and about the randomness of it all. I can accomplish this best with an abstract approach. Most of want I do is made real to viewers as it takes on familiar forms. When you see a piece like “so you” for an example, you see things that are familiar, like the weave patterns that are the basis of most woven craft, or the colors that remind you of the Caribbean. If you see this in the work, it then becomes real to you and less abstract. The randomness of the underlying media material plays second fiddle to the bold colors and geometric woven like patterns. This is when I am able to blur the lines between representation and abstraction.
GA GARDNER, “Happy Black”, 55″x42″, mixed media on mylar
Art:Jamaica: Much of the contemporary art in the Caribbean is very representation-based due to many of these artists seeking to question and investigate histories and realities. How does your work navigate these issues and this art scene?
GA: You can only appreciate a sharp image if you have seen a blurry one. If you have too many blurry images in your stories, it is no good and if you have too many sharp images, that’s no good either; they complement each other. Often the sharp image will draw you closer to it but the blurry image will make you think more and open a larger dialog, even if the dialog is about whether your eyes are working well. The sharp images to me are representational art, and the blurry images are abstract art. It takes all kinds and all angles to tell our story. My work is about this investigation of culture and how some cultures are left out and struggle to be included in the mainstream media’s relevant discussion. It has several components that are related directly to our Caribbean culture and our history as a people. The weaving of materials, for example, is simply a contemporary approach on what our ancestors did to make a living from what was afforded to them. We are a culture that knows how to deal with the things no one wants and make them into something that most can make use of. We did it in all areas of life, from food – using organs and other discarded animal parts for our meal – to clothing, music and many others. I am simply doing this in the arts, I take what is abundant and useless such as discarded media information and discuss a history of a people that then once again becomes appealing to an audience.
Read further about Gardner’s recent exhibition below:
Timeless Remnants -Social Alerts.com
To read this article in full, please visit the following link: http://artjamaica.blogspot.com/2014/10/what-does-cultural-identity-have-to-do.html
PLEASE CONTACT MORTON FINE ART FOR AVAILABLE WORK BY GA GARDNER.
1781 Florida Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20009 USA
(202) 628-2787
mortonfineart@gmail.com
NATHANIEL DONNETT’s solo exhibition opens Oct 23rd at the Mattatuck Museum
17 Oct
Alone in My Four Cornered Room – A Solo Exhibition of Artwork by NATHANIEL DONNETT
October 23, 2014- January 4, 2015
Mattatuck Museum, 144 West Main Street, Waterbury, CT
mattatuckmuseum.org
Context & Reflection: The Art of Nathaniel Donnett
In this exhibition, Alone in My Four Cornered Room, Nathaniel Donnett navigates the crossroads between the self and perception by others. His drawings, paintings, and sculpture suggest the transitional and unstable nature of perception. Donnett’s work is richly conceptualized and steeped in a deeply reflective, witty, and theoretically grounded history of race and difference in the United States. His work references the landmark scholarship of historian and activist, W.E.B. Dubois, and attends closely to the concept of double consciousness – DuBois’ understanding of the complex and nuanced ways in which African Americans in the United States must negotiate and reconcile their identity as both American and Black – both part of and pushed away from the heart of national identity. Donnett, like DuBois, is wrestling with the “peculiar sensation” in which one has “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
The title of the show, “Alone in My Four Cornered Room,” references a lyric from the 1991 classic hip-hop song, “My Mind’s Playing Tricks on Me,” by trio The Geto Boys. The song, like Donnett’s works explore isolation, paranoia, and identity in which perception of self and self-knowledge do not always match. In this way, Donnett takes up a strategy that has fortified hip-hop: referencing back to others in order to assemble links and connections. Both The Geto Boy and Donnett are exploring self-doubt, safety, and psychological well-being in the face of “double consciousness.” The works in this show represent Donnett’s investments in examining the entangled relationships between society, the art world, and identity. By exploring experiences of isolation, loneliness, and social stigma, and self -determination, Donnett restores and reclaims the humanity of African Americans living complex emotional lives.
Donnett’s layered works defy singular description, rather they are purposefully resistant to either/or interpretations or linear narratives. Donnett’s work is presenting us with both/and narratives in which as viewer we have a small window in which to glimpse the vertinginous experience of being both erased and highly visible – to be forced to know oneself based on the fears others might have of you. Donnett refers to this entangled interaction between the self and society as projections, noting that many of the notions we have about each other are based on narrow narratives or misinformation. Donnett’s work suggests that none of us are safe from internalizing misperceptions of others – even the misperceptions of our own identities and selves – and he explores how very challenging, complicated, and tangled such experiences can be. His carefully crafted work plays with the distance between self-knowledge and self-perception, while investigating the spaces where art, music, identity, history, the Black imagination, culture, the self, and standards of beauty may be explored – and even challenged. Donnett’s use of such diverse materials gestures toward the improvisation he highlights as part of African American culture.
ARC Magazine: Morton Fine Art presents ‘Timeless Remnants’ featuring Maya Freelon Asante, GA Gardner and Choichun Leung
14 Oct
Morton Fine Art presents ‘Timeless Remnants’ featuring Maya Freelon Asante, GA Gardner and Choichun Leung
Sunday, September 21st, 2014
Jung stated that “in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature…there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually, but is inherited”. Timeless Remnants explores that which resonates within the collective and individual memory and aims to elicit universal emotional response through techniques of script, mark making, composition, palette, texture, layering, energy and tensions present in the artwork.
About Maya Freelon Asante (Chapel Hill, b. USA): Maya Freelon Asante is an award-winning artist whose artwork was described by poet Maya Angelou as “visualizing the truth about the vulnerability and power of the human being,” and her unique tissue paper work was also praised by the International Review of African American Art as a “vibrant, beating assemblage of color.” She was selected by Modern Luxury Magazine as Best of the City 2013 and by the Huffington Post’s “Black Artists: 30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 You Should Know“. Maya has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including Paris, Ghana, and US Embassies in Madagascar, Italy, Jamaica, and Swaziland. She has been a professor of art at Towson University and Morgan State University. Maya has attended numerous residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Kokrobitey Institute and Brandywine Workshop. She earned a BA from Lafayette College and an MFA from the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
About GA Gardner (Trinidad, b. Trinidad): Gardner’s work is a visual representation of the proliferation of media and information in contemporary society and the resulting cacophony of messages it engenders. The goal of his work is to dissect and neutralize the white noise found in these forms of media and create cohesive stories that integrate his cultural background as an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago living and working in the USA. He presents a Caribbean aesthetic in his art by utilizing colors, textures, and environments as the lens through which he sees urban contemporary life in America, weaving his cultural identity back into the fabric of our society. GA Gardner began his professional art career in New York City, creating and exhibiting large format 3D computer fine art in 1996. Gardner studied fine art at San Francisco State University, California, from which he earned both his Bachelor’s of Arts and Master’s of Arts degrees. Gardner crafted mixed media art and animation at The Ohio State University, Columbus, where he earned a Ph.D. in Art Education in 1995. Gardner has served as a professor of art and animation at various universities, including William Paterson University (Wayne, New Jersey); University of the District of Columbia; and George Mason University (Fairfax, Virginia), and has been a lecturer at The Ohio State University.
About Choichun Leung (New York, b. UK): Leung’s “Diplopia” series of paintings occurred after losing partial eyesight in 2013 and living with double vision for a period of half a year. During this time, her perspective as a visual artist changed drastically – she no longer saw detail in objects clearly, had no spacial depth of vision, saw contrast and light intensely and sounds became more acute. Moving objects were blurry as her eyes could not synchronize to follow movement. The work in this series is an expression of what she experienced visually; when everything overlapped, and was blurry, intertwined and complex. Her “Diplopia” paintings are a record of the new way of seeing, which made her question her perception of reality of the senses, where loss created a new meaning of abstract impressions and color. She was raised in Wales, born to a British mother and Chinese father. Leung earned a degree in 3D design specializing in metalsmithing in the U.K., and later operated a metal studio fabricating her vessel designs and percussion instruments. Leung participated in the Ray Man Chinese Orchestra in London, performing Chinese classical and folk music. She later studied Buddhist Symbolism at the Yungang Caves Archaeological Site in China. This is her fourth exhibition at Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC.
Exhibition: September 26th- October 17th, 2014
Opening Night Reception: Friday, September 26th, 6pm-8pm Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave NW, Washington, DC 20009, United States
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ARC Inc. is a non-profit print and online publication and social platform launched in 2011. It seeks to fill a certain void by offering a critical space for contemporary artists to present their work while fostering and developing critical dialogues and opportunities for crucial points of exchange. ARC is an online and social space of interaction with a developed methodology of sharing information about contemporary practices, exhibitions, partnerships, and opportunities occurring in the Caribbean region and throughout its diasporas.
Opening Reception Shots from “Timeless Remnants”
9 OctThanks to photographer and MFA guest Ruby Hardy Black for documenting our opening reception for the group exhibition, “Timeless Remnants” featuring artwork by MAYA FREELON ASANTE, GA GARDNER & CHOICHUN LEUNG.
Thank you to all our collectors and art enthusiasts who came out for this wonderful exhibition!
Washington Post features “Timeless Remnants” – MAYA FREELON ASANTE, GA GARDNER & CHOICHUN LEUNG
7 OctThe Washington Post, “In the Galleries” section, Sunday, October 5, 2014
by Mark Jenkins
ARC Magazine interviews GA GARDNER on his show “Timeless Remnants”
2 Oct
Audible fragments amid the noise: An interview with GA Gardner
Thursday, September 25th, 2014 Categories: Exhibitions, Features, Updates
Gardner’s contemporary art practice homes in on the colossal machine of mass media and the messages it churns out. He extracts bits of information, dislodging them from specific moments in time to create new narratives; new points of identification and fresh collages of meaning that have personal and collective resonance. In the lead up to the show at MFA, Gardner shares insights into his art, revealing the influence of his life in and travels between the Caribbean and the U.S., his navigation of the terrain of randomness, and his engagement with the territory of patterns. The artist also speaks about the significance of timelessness in his work and his commitment to making Caribbean and African identities audible amid a din of Western communications.
Marsha Pearce: The exhibition Timeless Remnants seems to draw on discourses of psychology, including the work of such thinkers as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud posited the idea of “archaic remnants” or an “archaic heritage which a child brings with him [or her] into the world” (1940, p167). Jung also proposed his ideas. In addition to what he saw as a personal unconscious, which serves as a repository of experiences that are unique to each person, Jung asserted the notion of a second psychic system. He called this second system the collective unconscious and described it as that which is inherited. Does your work engage with a universal inheritance that you are deliberately making conscious with your art? If so, what do you see as that inheritance and how do you attend to it in your creative practice?
GA Gardner: I believe that I, like all human beings, am influenced by what has come before me. That might mean the personal structure of my familial ties, as well as the influences of artists before me. I don’t believe that any human being or artist for that matter, can create in a vacuum. I see my inheritance, if you want to call it that, as one that is traced back to my African roots at the primal level and to my Caribbean heritage, most recently. That is overlaid with my experience in the United States, where I have spent most of my adult years. So, I call on all of these influences, this inheritance – this collective unconscious – in my work. I use the rhythms and colours of Africa and the Caribbean to filter the “sounds” and “expressions” of America’s global communication machine.
MP: You seem to be foregrounding a specific collective unconscious; or pinpointing specific groups – African and Caribbean people. I am thinking though, about your attention to a global proliferation of media and messages in your art. Are we perhaps more and more the inheritors of a cacophony of media messages? Do you see that as an inheritance that is largely unconscious and one that goes beyond African and Caribbean “boundaries”?
GAG: Yes, that particularly applies in the 21st century, with the global reach and access of media messages.
MP: I want to return to Jung as a reference point. According to Jung, the collective unconscious is said to be expressed through archetypes or patterns. Can you talk about the role of patterns in your work?
GAG: Patterns are a fundamental component of my work. They often emerge from randomness as information is literally sliced out of context to form a montage of images that carries random conversations. These overall patterns and shapes are replicated from ancient African and modern Caribbean design. Like the Kuba people of central Africa I am interested in the construct of pattern and design. In addition, I find and use contemporary materials and I add a Caribbean colour palette to create art that best symbolizes our current state of being. Though I allow the process to lead, I commit to cultural forms and lines – for example, the geometric foms and lines that are inherent to cultures like that of the Kuba people – as guides for the direction of a piece. This does allow patterns to emerge uninhibited from my work. This is the magic of the creative process – a life, seemingly of its own, that the artistic endeavour engenders.
MP: Your visual amalgams of material remnants seem time consuming. How does the passage of time factor into your work? How might the concept of timelessness enter your visual statements?
GAG: Since my work reinvents and reinterprets material, timelessness is at the center of my creative expression. Once I have disassociated material from its former use and place in time, I allow it to flow free; to be unfettered from the moment it was created, or from any limitations of space or time. The repurposing of these fragments of communication produces an ageless, timeless new identity, which frees my work from temporal boundaries.
MP: You live and work in the Caribbean and the USA. What is it that remains with you as you move between those spaces and how do those remnants of experience in both spaces inform your work?
GAG: My work is conceptual; it represents the struggle for identity that we all face in the midst of globalization – chiefly, the dominance of Western influences and the struggle to be heard amongst all the noise of media. This is apparent in my travels; therefore I am compelled to represent this conflict in my art. I am not one who watches TV nor am I a news junky; I try my best to tune these elements out of my life. The very nature of going between these two countries reinforces the need for the messages in my art. It is born of the fact that we in the Caribbean consume so much foreign media that we are often at a loss for our personal and cultural identity.
I bring the printed content of North America’s vast media machine to the Caribbean and recycle it, extracting its artificial hues, and often add a rich colour palette found naturally in my Caribbean surroundings. This is the synergy I want in my art. I am making a statement that despite the dominance of Western media, Africa and the Caribbean will be heard – at least through the colour palette and patterns in my mixed media art.
The exhibition Timeless Remnants runs from September 26 to October 17, 2014 at Morton Fine Art, Washington, DC, USA.
– See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/09/audible-fragments-amid-the-noise-an-interview-with-ga-gardner/#sthash.d5zYGO5i.dpuf
Marsha Pearce is ARC’s Senior Arts Writer and Editor. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of the West Indies (UWI) St Augustine Campus, Trinidad. She lectures in the Department of Creative and Festival Arts at UWI and is also a freelance arts writer for the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian newspaper. Pearce is the 2006 Rhodes Trust Rex Nettleford Cultural Studies Fellow.
– See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/09/audible-fragments-amid-the-noise-an-interview-with-ga-gardner/#sthash.d5zYGO5i.dpuf
Morton Fine Art: curator's notes 