Increments of Time: New Works by NATALIE CHEUNG

 53 Hours, 2017, 30″x 44″, cyanotype on paper

We are excited to give you a sneak preview of new works by NATALIE CHEUNG from her upcoming solo exhibition Increments in Time.

Increments in Time features Cheung’s cyanotype mappings of evaporation. Cheung’s cyanotypes are reduced to the essential elements of capturing and recording light; light, paper, chemical reaction and chance which hearken back to the scientific roots of the medium. The prints record the transition from liquid to blueprint. The title of each work indicates the hours in which it took water to evaporate completely from the paper. What remains is the aftermath of an event, a map. This work examines the way in which nature perpetually creates patterns, seemingly random and chaotic yet with regularity and repetition.

Natalie was born in Falls Church, Virginia. She received her MFA in Photography from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and her BFA in Photography from the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, DC. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally; she has been profiled in Washington Spaces Magazine and has her work is represented in numerous collections including the Museum of Fine Art Houston and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Cheung has taught at the George Washington University as well as the Corcoran College of Art + Design and Temple University, Tyler School of Art. This marks her second solo exhibition at Morton Fine Art.

You can also see more of Natalie’s available works HERE.

 31 Hours, 2017, 30″x 44″, cyanotype on paper

76 Hours, 2017, 30″x 44″, cyanotype on paper

 1 Hour, 2017, 5″x 7″, cyanotype on paper

2 Hours, 2017, 5″x 7″, cyanotype on paper

 3 Hours (b), 2017, 8″x 9″, cyanotype on paper

 3 Hours, 2017, 8″x 9″, cyanotype on paper

 6 Hours, 2017, 8″x 9″, cyanotype on paper

New Works by NATE LEWIS

Mobile, hand sculpted paper photo print, 40″ x 26″​

We are excited to announce new works by Washington, DC based artist NATE LEWIS. They are from his latest series Tensions in Tapestries. 

 

We all have a lens through which we see. Our lens is distilled by our patterns of seeing and thinking which continually refines our lens. The lens we come to form becomes our filter.

Using figurative and portrait style images I hand-sculpt patterns and textures on to single sheets of paper that reveal unseen tensions on and within bodies representative of the past, present, and future – the physical and the spiritual, the tangible and intangible. 

Internal, as well as external influences come to refine our patterns of thinking, seeing, interacting and loving. Through the use of presence and absence, textures and distortion, I aim to challenge the filters we hold that dictate our views and our actions.

Through an attentive, intentional process of sculpting patterns and terrains of texture on bodies, I seek for this work to mirror the intentionality and consistency it can take in ones patterns of thinking and seeing to hold an empathetic lens.

-NATE LEWIS, 2017

 

Nathaniel Lewis grew up in Beaver Falls, near Pittsburgh, Pa. Born 1985, Nate benefited from the cultural mix of his Trinidad-born father who was raised in Brooklyn and his white American-born mother, raised in Philadelphia. He graduated from VCU with his BSN and has been a practicing critical care nurse for the past five years as well as professional fine artist. Tensions in Tapestries is Nate’s second solo exhibition at Morton Fine Art.

 

Please find images of the new works below. You can see more of Nate’s available works HERE.

​Thrice, hand sculpted paper photo print, 26″ x 40″

​Cloaked but Absent III, hand sculpted paper photo print, 40″ x 26″

Funk and Spine, hand sculpted paper photo print​, 40″ x 26″

​Archaic Pages, hand sculpted paper photo print, 18″ x 22″

Clenched, ​hand sculpted paper photo print, 14″ x 18″

Conductor, hand sculpted paper photo print, 20″ x 22″

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Dignity II, hand sculpted paper photo print, 22″ x 20″

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Signals II, ​hand sculpted paper photo print, 24″ x 26″

​Unbalanced and Clear, hand sculpted paper photo print, 24″ x 26″

‘Moments of Clarity’ New Oil Paintings by ANDREI PETROV

Friday, March 10th – March 29th, 2017

Midnight Rider, 2017, oil on canvas, 30″x 40″

OPENING DAY RECEPTION

Friday, March 10th, 6pm-8pm

The artist will be in attendance.

EXHIBITION LOCATION

Morton Fine Art (MFA)

1781 Florida Ave NW (at 18th & U Sts)

Washington, DC 20009

HOURS

Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm

Sunday 12pm-5pm

About ANDREI PETROV & Moments of Clarity

Based in New York City, ANDREI PETROV explores memory in his organic abstract paintings. His paintings probe the distortion, incompleteness and rare moments of clarity in the shadows of memory. Each piece portrays the intrinsic struggle and selective inclusion or exclusion of details in the process of recollection. At times, sharpness occurs in the rear of the picture plane while the out of focus, obscured areas, exist in a larger scale toward the foreground and make reference to the inscrutable nature of long and short term memory.

Petrov’s paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in prestigious collections and can be viewed at The Four Seasons Hotel in both Washington, DC and Punta Mita, Mexico, The Fairmont Hotel in Chicago and The Conrad Hotel, Miami. His paintings have also had cameos in the following films, The Royal Tenenbaums, Autumn in New York, Kate and Leopold, The Business of Strangers and Words and Lyrics. He is the featured visual artist 2016 for Music@Menlo.

Moments of Clarity marks ANDREI PETROV’s fifth consecutive solo exhibition at Morton Fine Art.

Safe Flight, 2017, oil on canvas, 48″x 36″

MAYA FREELON ASANTE’s solo show “IMPERMANENCE” at Morton Fine Art

 

Impermanence
A solo exhibition of new artwork by MAYA FREELON ASANTE

Saturday, December 12th, 2015 – January 5th, 2016

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About Impermanence

Impermance is Maya Freelon Asante’s first solo exhibition following a deeply personal loss.  Deborah Willis, Ph.D. writes “Maya  Freelon Asante  explores  memory, memorial  and  family  in her  art  practice. She   also  examines  the social  and  artistic  space  within  the experience  of motherhood and   grieving.    Maya’s  artwork  looks at the  fragility  of  life  and provides  the viewer  with  a   way  of retelling  a  story  about  life–joy and pain. Her current body of work draws on the temporal and is inspired by love of family specifically of her grandmother’s art practice as inspiration. ”

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About MAYA FREELON ASANTE’S process & inspiration

“In 2005 I discovered a beautiful accident; a stack of water damaged tissue paper tucked away in my grandmother’s basement was left with a brilliant and intricate stain. Since then I’ve submerged myself in the medium of bleeding tissue paper sculpture and tissue ink monoprints, which exist as simultaneously transient and steadfast. This dichotomy continues to intrigue and surprise me as I wrestle with sharing the unique beauty, fragility, and strength of my art with the world.

Much like my grandmother, who never wasted a single grain of rice on her plate, I find a way to utilize tissue paper at every stage of creation – including the rich and colorful ink released when the paper is wet, the sculptural mounds formed when creating monoprints, and even the tiny ripped pieces no larger than a fingernail which are collected and wound into spiral sculptures. Improvisation and discovery play a big role in my creative process; by incorporating archival photographs I’m able to reappropriate images, bridging a gap between the past and future.

My grandmother always said she “made a way out of no way” and her personal endurance opened a path for my own creative discovery. Art for me is about finding the message in the medium and honoring what fuels our desire to preserve and protect it. Bringing more peace, joy and light into the world is my primary objective, while simultaneously appreciating the beauty of now and creating everlasting memories.”

-MAYA FREELON ASANTE

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About MAYA FREELON ASANTE

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, by the Huffington Post’s “Black Artists: 30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 You Should Know”, and Cosmopolitan Magazine’s “Art Stars” as “the most badass female artists in the biz.”

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 Korobitey Institute and Brandywine Workshop. She earned a BA from Lafayette College and an MFA from the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is currently represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC.

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The Washington City Paper reviews Charles Williams’ ‘Swim’

Charles Williams’ ‘Swim’ at Morton Fine Art, Reviewed

Posted by Beth Shook on October 9, 2015 at 12:14 pm

You can be forgiven if your eye wanders in “Swim,” Charles Williams’ current solo show at Morton Fine Art. Between the clutter of the gallery and the works themselves—closely hung bursts of contrast in black and white—there is a lot to digest. But it’s impossible even for passersby to miss the centerpiece of the exhibition, Lost and Found #1, an immersive six-by-eight-foot canvas depicting frothy waves at night in photorealistic detail. The painting, mostly in black, simultaneously beckons and unnerves. 

Williams’s interest in water as a theme derives from his lifelong fear of swimming. He attributes the phobia both to his experience of nearly drowning at age 11 and to the racial stereotypes surrounding swimming that he faced growing up black in South Carolina. In the handful of fragmented self-portraits on view, Williams, who still doesn’t know how to swim, depicts himself variously in goggles, pool floaties, and wearing a towel draped over his head.

While the towel-as-hoodie is Williams’ most overt reference to the idea of swimming pools as sites of racial tension, race permeates the exhibition in other ways.  In some portraits Williams’ face floats disembodied, fracturing at its edges into individual brushstrokes in black and brown. It’s a literal deconstruction of the artist’s skin color—and the various tones and associations, including fear, that come with it.

The exploration of black is further developed in nearby paintings from theNighttime series, in which Williams has painted waves in a heavy black impasto over backgrounds of the same color. These smaller paintings, as well as the artist’s closely cropped monochrome seascapes on Mylar, deserve a closer look. Unfortunately, the installation gives them little room to breathe. Viewers are better off focusing on the large-scale work; the tide will carry you from there.

“Swim” runs until Oct. 13. 1781 Florida Ave. N.W.

Charles Williams, Lost and Found 1, 72″x 96,” oil on canvas, Courtesy of Morton Fine Art

THE GUARDIANS, a solo exhibition of new work by artist KESHA BRUCE. December 14th, 2013-January 8th, 2014.

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About the Guardians:

In the winter of 2011, Kesha Bruce awoke in the early morning hours to see a figure hovering silently at the foot of her bed. This brief moment of fascination, terror, and eventually wonder, has beenthe obsessive focus of her work for nearly three years. To date, Bruce has completed nearly 200 works based on The Guardians – a group of solemn, mysterious figures who act as watchers, keepers, and protectors.

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About Kesha Bruce:

Sidestepping the weight and implications of formalized religion forthe better part of her career, Bruce’s work has explored the fertile territory of memory, mythology, African-American folklore, and magical-spiritual belief. With The Guardians her work makes a shift towards questioning not only the place of spiritual practice in contemporary culture, but also the place of genuine spiritual experience in contemporary art making.

THE GUARDIANS Opening Reception and Artist Talk

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About the Guardians:

In the winter of 2011, Kesha Bruce awoke in the early morning hours to see a figure hovering silently at the foot of her bed. This brief moment of fascination, terror, and eventually wonder, has beenthe obsessive focus of her work for nearly three years. To date, Bruce has completed nearly 200 works based on The Guardians – a group of solemn, mysterious figures who act as watchers, keepers, and protectors.

Sidestepping the weight and implications of formalized religion forthe better part of her career, Bruce’s work has explored the fertile territory of memory, mythology, African-American folklore, and magical-spiritual belief. With The Guardians her work makes a shift towards questioning not only the place of spiritual practice in contemporary culture, but also the place of genuine spiritual experience in contemporary art making.

The show will run through January 8th, 2014

Artwork by Victor Ekpuk- Live painting in Amsterdam

Artwork by Victor Ekpuk, made during the presentation of ZAM Africa Magazine in 2009.

Nathaniel Donnett’s ZZZ’s reviewed

Photo credit: Nathaniel Donnett

December 17th, 2012 – Carrie Marie Schneider

ZZzzzzzz by Nathaniel Donnett was the result of his one-week residency at Art League Houston as part of the group show/mini residency STACKS, curated by Robert Pruitt. On opening night for STACKS, the five participating artists—Phillip Pyle II, Nathaniel Donnett, Jamal Cyrus, M’kina Tapscott and Autumn Knight—were clad in gray hazmat suits while they inventoried, announced, axed and fed collected objects that their offerers felt represented “blackness” into a wood chipper. Each subsequent week one of these artists is invited to use the remnants in their own exhibition.

In a panel discussion for ZZzzzzzz, Pruitt framed STACKS as a way to make public and tangible the conversations he’d been having with his peers, as well as a way to defy the lack of expectation and exhibition of rigorous conceptual work and theory-based investigations by black artists, “to show that we talk about what they do not think we are thinking about.” When asked whether continuing to rehash and redefine “Black Art” only continues black artists’ confinement to an expected loop, Pruitt said it is the conversation that matters.

On that note, I’d like to point out that the talk for ZZzzzzzz was rare in two ways: 1. It was a participatory performance work that asked to hear about the participants’ experiences. 2. It was a panel discussion that actually included discussion.

Nathaniel Donnett was the second STACKS artist to have his go. His first choice of medium was time travel, but barring that, dreams were the next best thing.

Inspired by Carl Jung’s writing and his St. Elizabeth experiment (to determine if African Americans had a different consciousness than white Americans), Donnett led a week chock full of investigations around the idea of “Black Imagination.” It started with inviting four people, two artists and two collectors, to spend the night in the gallery space. They slept, attempted to sleep, or cursed Donnett for sleep deprivation to a soundtrack he created from lectures, found sounds and music. “Donnie Darko” also played.

Continue reading the article here

WRESTLING WITH ANGELS, New Work by Kesha Bruce

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For nearly a decade, Kesha Bruce has addressed issues surrounding African-American identity and spirituality in her work. The paintings on paper in her Wrestling with Angels series hint at an even deeper and more direct vein of inquiry into the nature of spiritual struggle in immediate confrontation with the contemporary world.

Inspired by the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, the 14 artworks depict two figures, of indistinguishable gender, who seem to be engaged in either an intimate dance or a violent struggle. In one work, a nearly transparent and elegantly rendered figure draws the second into a passionate embrace; while in another image, an ominous, imposing figure seems on the verge of striking a fatal blow.

With Bruce’s attention shifting more towards the exploration of contemporary spirituality, not surprisingly, the imagery in Wrestling with Angels has become more abstract. Each work is more an evocation of a psychological state than an illustration of a biblical narrative.

In stark contrast to Bruce’s past work, which combined photography, collage and text elements, these new works show real evidence of both the artist’s hand and personal impulses- intricate patterning and ornamentation collide with zones of chaotic brushwork; fluid washes of color overlap areas of stark linear mark-making, and even the paper itself literally buckles under the weight of the frenzied movement. The end result is a compelling synthesis of color and gesture, deeply informed by narrative, allegory and spirituality.

Wrestling With Angels will be up at Morton Fine Art through January 2nd, 2012