GA GARDNER in “Growth” exhibition at Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts on St. Croix

 

GA GARDNER, A Struggle to Survive, 43″x42″, mixed media on mylar

Frederiksted, St. Croix – The Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts is excited to announce the opening of Growth, a group exhibition featuring works selected from the international public art collection of Thru Contemporary Arts. Growth will be on view at CMCArts from May 29 – June 27, 2015. Details are below.

Opening Reception at the Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts
Friday, May 29th from 5:00 to 8:00 PM
Free admission. Cash bar and light refreshments provided.

About the exhibition:

Growth is the second exhibition presented by Thru Contemporary Arts. It opens at the Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts on St. Croix and follows a recent, inaugural exhibition in Cologne, Germany. Growth is intended to expand conversation about the nature and boundaries of art in the Caribbean by exposing the public to a variety of approaches to creating contemporary art. It features a specially selected collection of contemporary art by present-day artists from countries around the world. From mixed media art to photography, embroidery, and digital works of art – all are represented in this exhibition, which is part of Thru Contemporary’s permanent public collection.

Thru Contemporary Arts is a project of GETTHRU, a non-profit arts organization based in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago: www.getthru.org

Growth includes works by:

Judith Ganz
GA Gardner
Beata Obst
Adele Todd
Clary Estes
Georg Gartz
Ute Bartel
Lap Yip
Christop Bartolosch
Almuth Baumfalk
Julia Neuenhausen
Sarah Knights

About Thru Contemporary Arts:

Thru Contemporary Arts is a project initiative of the non-profit arts organization GETTHRU, based in Trinidad & Tobago (www.getthru.org). The project is dedicated to showcasing contemporary artists and their work in countries that lack access to nontraditional art forms and techniques.

Thru Contemporary Arts focuses on exhibition, education and the preservation of contemporary arts, and houses and maintains a juried collection. The project acquires and promotes the artworks of prominent contemporary artists at various stages of their careers. This public collection is exhibited at museums, galleries and other spaces with the goal of educating and introducing under-served communities to various forms of contemporary art. As part of this project the organization publishes and prints arts catalogs and books on various contemporary arts subjects. Thru Contemporary Arts is a collaboration of artists, writers, and curators.

To learn more, please visit or contact:

Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts

10 Strand Street & 62 King Street

Frederiksted, St. Croix, USVI 00840

Phone: (340) 772-2622/ Fax: (340) 772-2612

cmcarts@gmail.com

 

This project is funded in part by Virgin Islands Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Please contact Morton Fine Art for available work by GA GARDNER. 

Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave NW, Washington, DC, 20009, USA

http://www.mortonfineart.com

(202) 628-2787

mortonfineart@gmail.com

ARC Magazine interviews GA GARDNER on his show “Timeless Remnants”

 

Audible fragments amid the noise: An interview with GA Gardner

By Marsha Pearce Thursday, September 25th, 2014 Categories: Exhibitions, Features, Updates

Caribbean-born artist GA Gardner will display his work along with Maya Freelon Asante (USA) and Choichun Leung (UK) in the group show entitled Timeless Remnants. The exhibition opens on September 26, 2014 at Morton Fine Art (MFA) in Washington DC. Gardner migrated from his birthplace of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago to North America in 1988, where he earned a BA in Visual Arts and an MA from San Francisco State University. He was also awarded a doctoral degree in Art Education from Ohio State University.

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

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

TIMELESS REMNANTS Group Exhibition Opens Friday September 26th, 2014

TIMELESS REMNANTS

New Abstract Artworks in a variety of media by MAYA FREELON ASANTE, GA GARDNER and CHOICHUN LEUNG

September 26th- October 17th, 2014

OPENING RECEPTION 

Friday, September 26th, 6pm-8pm

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”. The abstract artwork in Timeless Remnants combines elements of “inherited” collective memory consisting of pre-existent forms and each artist’s individual experience of life, colored with her/his unique culture, personality and life events.  Featured artists hail from varied countries of origin, and bring forward bountiful travels and experiences from around the world. 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.

 

 

MAYA FREELON ASANTE, Again & Again, 56″x58″, tissue ink on paper

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 Korobitey Institute and Brandywine Workshop. She earned a BA from Lafayette College and an MFA from the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

 

 

 

GA GARDNER, So You, 65″x42″, mixed media on mylar 

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.

 

 

CHOICHUN LEUNG, The Transparent Route, 48″x50″, acrylic on canvas 

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. 

CHOICHUN LEUNG 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 Yangung Caves Archaeological Site in China. This is her forth exhibition at Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC.

 

About Morton Fine Art: 

Founded as an innovative solution to the changing contemporary art market, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that anyone can become an art collector, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of innovative exhibitions and a new generation of art services.

New work by GA GARDNER

 

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Artwork in “Fragmentation & Integration” – GA GARDNER and ANDREI PETROV

View the work online! Including new arrivals by artist ANDREI PETROV – arriving in the gallery today!

Andrei Petrov, Anatomy of Temptation (SOLD)

Andrei Petrov, Cognitive Distortion (SOLD)

Andrei Petrov, Partial Obstruction, 29×36, oil on canvas

Andrei Petrov, Perpetual Access (SOLD)

Andrei Petrov, Time Lapse, 32″x48″, oil on canvas

Andrei Petrov, Untitled, 13×48, oil on canvas

Andrei Petrov, Havana Nocturne, 36″x48″, oil on canvas

Andrei Petrov, Maine Stay, 30″x48″, oil on canvas

Andrei Petrov, Morrocan Field Trip, 48″x60″, oil on canvas

Andrei Petrov, Nostalgia in Lake George, 30″x48″, oil on canvas (SOLD

Andrei Petrov, Process of Elimination, 36″x22″, oil on canvas

Andrei Petrov, Whiff of Hope, 13″x48″, oil on canvas

GA Gardner, Six Degrees, 42″x44″, mixed media on mylar

GA Gardner, Dangerous, 61″x42″, mixed media on mylar

GA Gardner, Home, 69″x42″, mixed media on mylar (SOLD)

GA Gardner, Red, White, Blue and Black, 72″x42″, mixed media on mylar

GA Gardner, White Path, 55″x84″, mixed media on mylar

GA Gardner, Blinding Beauty, 50″x42″, mixed media on mylar

GA GARDNER & ANDREI PETROV’s show “Gallery Opening of the Week” in Washington Post

The Washington Post, Friday, March 8, 2013

The “Fragmentation & Integration” exhibition at Morton Fine Art will feature work from GA Gardner and Andrei Petrov, including the latter’s oil painting “Moroccan Field Trip.”

GALLERY OPENING OF THE WEEK

Formal considerations – how a work of art is put together – are front and center in “Fragmentation & Integration,” a two-person exhibition opening Friday from 6 to 8 p.m. at Morton Fine Art. The show features the abstractions of G.A. Gardner and Andrei Petrov, two artists whose manipulations of surface, pattern and scale explore the tension between coming together and falling apart.

But form also can convey a deeper meaning, as in the case of Gardner’s organic images, which the artist says are about the theme of memory and forgetting.

-Michael O’Sullivan
________________________

Through April 2 at 1781 Florida Ave. NW (Metro: U Street).
202-628-2787
http://www.mortonfineart.com. Free.

Fragmentation & Integration Opening Reception March 8th, 2013

Great opening reception for “Fragmentation and Integration” on Friday night! “Gallery Pick of the Week” in the Washington Post!! Congratulations to the artists, GA Gardner and Andrei Petrov!

The show explores how two artists, GA Gardner (Washington, DC b. Trinidad) and Andrei Petrov (NYC, b. USA), utilize mediums, additive and subtractive processes, patterns and scale to create abstracted organic works of art.

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GA GARDNER & ANDREI PETROV’s “Fragmenta​tion & Integratio​n” opens 3/8/13

Fragmentation and Integration

An Exhibition of new work by GA GARDNER & ANDREI PETROV

March 8th, 2013 – April 2nd, 2013

OPENING RECEPTION

Friday, March 8th from 6pm-8pm

**Both artists will be in attendance.**

_________________________________

Morton Fine Art is pleased to present an exciting exhibition of new work by artists GA GARDNER and ANDREI PETROV.

The exhibition will be on display from March 8th, 2013 through April 2nd, 2013. The opening reception will be held on Friday, March 8th from 6 to 8 pm.  Both artists will be in attendance.

____________________________

About Fragmentation and Integration:

The show explores how two artists, GA Gardner (Washington, DC b. Trinidad) and Andrei Petrov (NYC, b. USA), utilize mediums, additive and subtractive processes, patterns and scale to create abstracted organic works of art. ______________________________

About GA GARDNER (Washington, DC/ Brooklyn, NY b. Trindad; mixed media on mylar):

GA Gardner, Red, White and Blue, 72″x42″, mixed media on mylar

GA Gardner was born in 1969 in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, and migrated to the USA in 1988 where he earned his BA in Visual Arts and MA in Educational Technology from San Francisco State University. He also received a Ph.D. in Art Education from The Ohio State University. There he focused on Computer Art Education. When he emerged in 1995, he was already considered an international expert on the subjects of Computer Art Education, Computer Graphics and Animation, and a pioneer in the the area of large format digital fine art. Gardner created crisp and detailed three-dimensional images on water color paper that discussed the social elements of Caribbean cultures.

His work has been exhibited at various museums and galleries in the USA, Asia and the Caribbean, including the James E. Lewis Museum of Art; Paterson Museum, New Jersey; Nanjing College of Art, China; Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts, St Croix, USVI, Bergen Museum, New Jersey and Morton Fine Art, DC. He has been the subject of numerous articles and catalog essays. He has been awarded artist residencies in the Caribbean and Asia.

GA Gardner currently lives and works in Washington DC and Brooklyn NY.

_______________________________

About ANDREI PETROV (NYC, b. USA; layered oil on canvas):

Andrei Petrov, Morrocan Field Trip, 48″x60″, oil on canvas

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.

“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 creating a contrast of textures which resemble collaged elements. 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