create! Magazine features KATHERINE TZU-LAN MANN

Water Ribbon, A Solo Exhibition By Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann At Morton Fine Art In Washington D.C.

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Water Ribbon, 2021, Acrylic and sumi ink on paper, 90 x 60 in, Image courtesy of Morton Fine Art.

We’re excited to share the announcement of Water Ribbon, a solo exhibition of new works on paper by Washington, D.C.-based artist Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, on view from September 8th – October 6th, 2021 at Morton Fine Art. Featuring a collection of recent pieces by the artist, the exhibition offers an evocative perspective on contemporary ecologies during a time at which environmental destruction and the consequences of climate change loom ever larger. Utilizing acrylic, sumi ink, and collage, Mann draws from traditions of Chinese landscape painting to create mesmerizing, vibrant depictions of organic matter.

Mann begins her process by pouring liquid pigments onto paper, allowing them to dry and yielding a stain of color from which the work is then based. Through an embrace of the indeterminate qualities of her materials—the ink or paint takes its own course, without the artist dictating its shapes or forms—Mann demonstrates a symbiotic relationship to her materials that serves as an apt metaphor for coexistence with the natural world. What results from Mann’s subsequent additions to the paper are rich, layered tableaus imbued with an affective interplay of ideas.

Of the challenges posed by her recent work, Mann describes her rumination upon “the resuscitation of landscape painting in a world where ‘landscape’ is represented and defined through an ever-widening field of digital, graphic, and visual forms.” At times almost dizzying, the pieces shown in Water Ribbon eschew Western conventions of spatial perspective and inert figuration, instead embracing qualities of movement and monumentality central to Chinese landscape painting traditions.

Bright hues and a multiplicity of patterns are nestled among Mann’s illustrations of flora and fauna, with streams of ink evoking vines and riverbeds. Lying in the tension between the artificial and the organic, Mann’s renderings suggest and intertwining of systems rather than a constant grappling for control or domination. Splashes of ink seep across each image, traversing various shapes and forms. Elsewhere, translucent swathes of paint filter views of plant life, appearing like stained-glass window through which to gaze. “In my most recent work, I hope to live in the tradition of landscape painting, experiencing it for what it has always been: an occasion for radical experimentation and confrontation with the world, in the broadest sense of the term that sustains us,” said Mann. Amongst all the chaos and beauty, Water Ribbon proposes a mode of coexistence attuned to change, reciprocity, and an honoring of diverse forms of life.

Arch 3, 2020, Acrylic and sumi ink on paper, 56 x 56 in, Image courtesy of Morton Fine Art.

Artist Statement:

My work’s abstractions arise from the subjects I portray: ecological and geological cycles, processes of chemical corrosion and natural efflorescence. With roots in traditions of Chinese landscape painting, my monumentally sized paintings and installations evolve a fantastic, abstract vision of the natural world. My latest work confronts the challenge: the resuscitation of landscape painting in a world where “landscape” is represented and defined through an ever-widening field of digital, graphic, and visual forms. How can a painting capture flux, abundance, waste, fertility, and the collision and collusion of diverse forms? How can it respond to the pressure we place on our era’s fragile ecosystem? My paintings explore both questions by sustaining tension between what is artificial and what is natural, between what is chemical and what is biological, between organic and inorganic. The paper on which I paint is not only a recognition of a tradition of Chinese painting; it is also a medium of vulnerability and expansiveness, susceptible to crease and tear as well as to collage and collation. My own role in the creation of the paintings strikes a balance between the purposive and the protective. I trust to process, chance, and change, but I encourage, direct, and facilitate all of these. In my most recent work, I hope to live in the tradition of landscape painting, experiencing it for what it has always been: an occasion for radical experimentation and confrontation with the world, in the broadest sense of the term that sustains us.

Crust, Mantle, Core, 2021, Acrylic and collage on paper, 60 x 60 in, Image courtesy of Morton Fine Art.

Alicia Puig

Available artwork by KATHERINE TZU-LAN MANN

Contact Morton Fine Art to view by appointment. (202) 628-2787 (call or text), info@mortonfineart.com. Mask required.

NATHANIEL DONNETT’s “Sub-woofer” public art installation featured in New Haven Independent

Artist Goes Guerrilla Public

by LINDSEY MANCINI | Aug 19, 2021 9:07 am

(3) Comments | Post a Comment | E-mail the Author

Posted to: Arts & Culture, Visual Arts

NATHANEIL DONNETT PHOTOS

From the sidewalk, you might see it from across the street. It looks like it’s supposed to be there, a bit of straightforward wooden fencing that might contain an electrical box or some other public utility.

But if you look closely, you might notice one slat of the fencing is painted a deep blue. If you cross the street, you’ll see the wood is patterned, and that the whole object stands as an entirely different kind of public utility.

Inside the fencing is an altar that celebrates music and the celestial world within — and for — a community

DANIELLE DE JESUS PHOTO

Nathaniel Donnett, an artist who splits his time between New Haven and Houston (and was part of a group show at City Gallery in May), created the public installation, Sub-woofer, on a Sunday in July.

It now stands in an undisclosed location in New Haven as the start of a public, visual conversation with the community living directly around it.

As the artist described it, “it’s another band member in the group ensemble” that is the public space.

Donnett selected this location because the people living in the neighborhood are mostly working-class Black people. It’s the kind of neighborhood plagued by education and housing issues, while it’s also a target of gentrification.

“These neighborhoods remind me of the neighborhoods I was raised in,” Donnett said, writing to me via email that these neighborhoods contain significant cultural value that often become coopted by institutions. These institutions downplay their complicity in this theft, and fail to give back to the communities that allow them to grow and flourish.

“Those relationships seemed strained or rarely coincide,” Donnett said, “The piece speaks to that complex relationship in a general way.”

The structure of the piece consists of three panels of wooden fencing leaning against one another at their edges. The triangular fence subverts notions of access; that is, you can’t get inside. But through the slats in the panelling, and in a pattern of cut-outs — each containing a pair of tambourine jingles — you can see an installation inside that inaccessible space, made up of records representing some of America’s greatest musicians: Count Basie, Roscoe Robinson, the Jackson 5, Nancy Wilson, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, Louis Armstrong. If you’re tall enough, you can peer over the fence to catch a full view of the records within, but there’s a strong sense of interiority versus exteriority — what’s protected as opposed to what’s visible from afar.

Donnett selected the tambourine jingles that allow for this visual gateway into the piece because of their use in the Southern Black church. In Sub-woofer, they imply sound and movement, bringing rhythm and accent to the familiar, static panelling of the wood.

“I was at a funeral a couple of years ago and noticed that it [the tambourine] was played as a single solo instrument, but the jingles acted as a collective,” Donnett said. “That reminded me how people employ acts of individualism and collective action as not a singular thing, but a multiplicity of actions.”

Since it was a Sunday, the installation of the piece itself was uneventful. Donnett took three visits to the site and an extra trip to the record store, but no one approached him as he worked.

“I think sometimes people can sense your energy,” he said. “They can sense if you’re there to harm or to create problems.” After setting up the piece’s wooden infrastructure, Donnett returned, installing the albums purchased from a local record store on site.

The patterns of the tambourine jingles reference the constellations of stars, employing elements of sacred geometry to create a percussive grid that’s both implemented and disrupted by the viewer’s own expectations of where the next dash of silver will lie.

“The pattern utilizes a visual language where sound is silent,” said Donnett, “and expected based on our personal relationship to sound, socializing of sound, and social agreement.”

The line of blue that signals the piece from afar works almost like a metronome, keeping time. The rich ultramarine reaches back and historically across continents, through Egyptian, Buddhist, and European paintings to the first uses of lapis lazuli about 9,000 years ago in present-day Afghanistan. For Donnett, the color represents both spirituality and humanity, and its implementation here, on a single piece of wood, reveals “the individual amongst many other individuals.”

To the artist, the blue line (almost a Barnett Newman-type “zip”) is especially important “considering the shift in the spatial and symbolic dynamic when approaching the piece,” he said. The color works to translate the object from utilitarian to sculptural, from intellectual to spiritual, from exclusion to invitation, from artist to community and back again, as New Haven discovers it.

Available Artwork by NATHANIEL DONNETT

New mixed media and experimental printmaking artworks by ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY

ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY, Blossoms Fall, 2021, 16″x12″, mixed media and experimental printmaking on canvas

Rosemary Feit Covey was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. In a career spanning three decades she has exhibited internationally and received countless awards. Ms. Covey is the recipient of both a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and Alpha Delta Kappa Foundation National Fine Art Award. Ms. Covey’s work is in many major museum and library collections, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the New York Public Library Print Collection, the National Museum of American History, Harvard University and the Papyrus Institute in Cairo, Egypt. In 2007 a large retrospective of Ms. Covey’s science-related work was displayed at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago.

Ms. Covey was the recent recipient of a fellowship at Georgetown University Medical Center, as the 2007-2008 Artist-in-Residence. She has also held residencies in Bellagio, Italy and in Santa Ana, California and has had solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including Toronto, New York, Chicago, Washington DC, Buenos Aires, Zurich and Geneva. Solo museum exhibitions include the Butler Museum of American Art and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts. Her work has been exhibited in countless group exhibitions including major exhibitions at the National Collection of Fine Arts and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Most recently two pieces were shown at the Danforth Museum. Eric Denker, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Henry T. Hopkins, Director of the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center in Los Angeles have written comprehensive articles on Ms. Covey’s work.

Covey has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2010.

ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY, Yana’s Birds, 2021, 46″x30″, mixed media and experimental printmaking on canvas

Available artwork by ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY

On view by appointment at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St NW #302, Washington, DC 20001

info@mortonfineart.com

(202) 628-2787 (call or text)

New Arrivals from ANDREI PETROV’s NYC studio

Andrei Petrov, Pieces of a Thought, 2018, 40″x60″, oil on canvas

The production of a painting begins with a pencil or ink drawing on paper which I extrapolate from and edit as I work the canvas. First with pencil or charcoal and then with color washes done with acrylic or ink, I map the raw canvas and allow it to be ingrained with the materials. Once satisfied with the composition and balance, the surface is sealed with a clear acrylic so as to allow the use of oil based pigments. Handmade tools are used to drag, apply, scrape and blend the paint across the canvas plane. Sandpaper and rags also propel the evolution of the work. The addition and subtraction of paint are meant to act as a metaphor for the intentions and motives for which the paintings are based.

– Andrei Petrov

Andrei Petrov, Staycation, 2019, 40″x40″, oil on canvas

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Fairmont Hotel, Chicago, IL

Four Seasons Hotel, Washington, DC

Four Seasons Hotel, Punta Mita, Mexico

Conrad Hotel, Miami, FL

The Athem, New York, NY

Hotel Plaza Athenee, New York, NY

Andrei Petrov, Pensive Sunday, 2020, 40″x60″, oil on canvas

Andrei Petrov, Chiming In, 2015, 38″x72″, oil on canvas

Available Artwork by ANDREI PETROV

On view by appointment at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St NW #302, Washington, DC 20001

info@mortonfineart.com

(202) 628-2787 (call or text)