March 2011
March’s Member Show featured work by Helen Anne, Jeanne Day, Pepe Piedra, Lauren Kotkin, Lauren Shea Little, Marina Reiter, Monica Jahan Bose, Paul Reuther, and Richard Starr. The show was curated by Washington D.C. based photographer Tom Wolff.
Match 2011
Working with materials that are intrinsically seductive, sensuously attractive and easily made beautiful, has led Karin Birch to vigilantly ruminate on meaning, on how art requires more than surface appeal to engage the emotions and the mind. Material alone may mesmerize for a moment, and visualized time caught by hand-work is captivating, but there must ultimately be fertile ground for deeper and more meaningful experience. Her varied materials allow her to synthesize the naturalness and fluidity of paint with the patterned regularity of textiles, resulting in a depth of aesthetic complexity absent in a simple painting or textile piece. Her work proceeds from slowness, from observing, imagining, and from a fascination with pattern and line.
Visit Birch’s blog at karinbirch.blogspot.com.
March 2011
Physical placement of objects and organisms in the world often appears random, unpredictable. Sacha Ingber’s work investigates the driving forces and logic, or lack thereof, behind the organization of these things. Things both living and inanimate, microscopic and massive. She is driven by a belief in the inherent seductive materiality of objects. Her work hovers in a space between object, still life, architecture, and model. It manifests as a vivid fragment of an object or as an architectural structure that wants to exist in a specific place. The materials and artifacts within the work are sometimes found and unaltered—bringing with them a distinct history—or highly manipulated, transformed into something other.
Visit Ingber’s website at www.sachaingber.com.
February 2011
Emerging from the dark yet whimsical world of children’s literature, Jessika Tarr’s exhibition Monstrous features works that are both narrative and theatrical. Just as German story books combine dark and provocative themes with seemingly innocent illustrations, her works contain a tension between content and style. While overtly signifying fear itself, much of her imagery alludes to the subconscious and collective fantastical, exploring the aesthetics of surrealism and dreams.
Visit Tarr’s website at www.jessikatarr.com.
February 2011
For the past five years, Helen Glazer’s work has been heavily influenced by chaos and complexity theories’ perspectives on the unpredictability of natural phenomena. As her latest Clouds series demonstrates, the artistic process is analogous to the dynamical systems posited by chaos and complexity theories—that is, an artwork takes shape within particular conditions of time, place, medium and the artist’s own hand, finally unfolding as these unpredictable forces interact. Under Glazer’s hand, clouds reveal themselves as intricately textured three-dimensional forms arising from the complex rhythms of flowing currents of air and from the artists’ own consciousness. They gesture and take on a poetic resonance. They morph into unexpected, almost otherworldly forms that would be difficult to invent. Clouds jarringly reminds the viewer that stability is an illusion, and that the reality we live in is being replaced moment by moment.
Visit Glazer’s website at www.helenglazer.com.
