Marion Balac lives and works in France. She creates large graphite works that are jam packed with detail. Her drawings often feature extremely dense foliage juxtaposed with large white voids. The visual combination of painstaking detail coupled with empty space helps to accentuate her lush compositions. Are the mysterious ghostly forms ominous forces? Or respite from an ever swelling forest? The viewer is pulled into a stark landscape where anxiety reigns.
Luminaria by Architects of Air is a touring inflatable structure. The ‘building’ has made stops internationally since 1992. Visitors to the Luminaria remove their shoes and enter an air lock. Once through the airlock visitors are free to roam the structure. The Luminaria is built of inflated PVC. Sunlight from outside shines through the various colors of PVC creating an otherworldly glow. The highly saturated colors coupled with the gently curving walls and floor give the Luminaria a subtle biological nature. Interestingly one visitor describes the structure as ” Somewhere between a womb and a cathedral.”
Noam Rappaport lives and works in Los Angeles. He has just opened his first West Coast solo exhibition at Ratio 3 in San Francisco. Rappaport’s minimal structures are at once slight and commanding, often relying on negative space to complete visual metaphors. The walls behind his pieces are simultaneously backround to and an integral part of the work. The show runs through March 23rd. From the press release: “This exhibition will feature a series of new works which simultaneously reside between painting, sculpture, assemblage, and drawing. One predominant motif within Rappaport’s work is the representation of image through minimal compositions, color, and mark making. With Rappaport’s discerning use of simplified geometric shapes and refined color palates, the compositions reflect elements of the human form, landscape, and architecture. This suggestion of imagery is balanced with concepts of objecthood as expressed through constructions of commonplace materials and shaped canvases. The peripheries of these objects become the focus as color fields divide the shallow relief canvases, aluminum sheets drape over the edge of plywood panels and graphic lines appear to float in front of the surface.
These hybrid painting supports create a physical and perceptual relationship to the viewer. Negative spaces and blocks of color begin to suggest doorways, windows, and various characteristics that mirror the human figure. The attention to the space between the viewer and the work reinforces the idea that not only does a viewer look but he or she is also looked upon to play an active role in the object’s function.”
Mark Mulroney is currently showing new work at Mixed Greens in Chelsea. The exhibition, entitled We’re Never Getting Rescued With That Attitude, features paradisiacal scenery created with graphite and acrylic applied to both found book paper and carved wood panel, respectively. In addition to reading Gauguin’s letters from Tahiti, studying Tarzan imagery, and internalizing clichéd tropical sunsets, Mulroney investigated 30-years-worth of Playboy and Penthouse magazines in preparation for the show. Click past the jump for some installation views, and check it out in person before April 20th.
Photographer Minh Tran captures the raw, gritty nightlife of Portland in his series Nights, Camera, Action! The images simultaneously surprise with their intimacy and reflect what one might expect in a Portland night out complete with some PBR cradling. It’s a fun, seemingly endless scroll of people who just look like a real good time. When you make it over there, make sure to keep an eye out for a Stevie Wonder cameo.
Robert Josiah Bingaman is the master of beautiful dark landscapes. Bingaman states about his work: “My studio practice is an idiosyncratic teeter-totter; a shifting set of consistent obsessions. The first, to be “out there”, in the distant places, and the second, an anxious need to permanently mark the rare, fleeting moments that originate from those places. The scenes I paint are the result of an indulgent desire to regain the innocence and satisfaction I once associated with the subjects depicted. Yet, in the offing, these paintings reveal my struggle to name what I haven’t found.”
The work of Korean artist Cha Jong-Rye looks like anything but wood. Her large pieces hang on the wall as if they were draped cloth, strange liquids, and geological formations. Her peculiar choice of medium undoubtedly references these and other ideas of nature and the home. She painstakingly carves her work from wood, often from hundreds of small pieces. She seems to crumple, pinch, and pull a material that’s especially rigid, typically found as a tree or house. They’re temptingly tactile – if no one in the gallery noticed I’d nearly be enticed to drag my fingers across their surface. [via]
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