Erin Boland, Spirit Cabinet, 2012

Erin Boland, Levitation, 2012

Erin Boland, Untitled (Flammarion), 2012

Erin Boland, Untitled (Flammarion), 2012

Erin Boland, Apport #7, 2012

Erin Boland, Apport #3, 2012

Erin Boland, Operator 1 & 2, 2012

January 2013

Apport

The modern Spiritualist movement—the belief in and practice of communication with the dead through psychic mediums—came to prominence in the U.S. beginning in the mid-19th century. A typical séance of this period would include a structure known as a Spirit Cabinet—a curtained area in which the medium would sit that functioned as the portal to the afterlife. Following successful contact with the spirit world, an ectoplasmic substance would emit from various bodily orifices of the medium and surround the séance participants. The substance had a short life cycle over which it appeared first as dense liquid, intangible vapor and finally cobweb-like object before disappearing. In some cases, the medium would appear to conjure a fully materialized object from some unknown paranormal source. This is known as an “apport.”

This work investigates the suspension of disbelief that allowed the Spiritualist audience—a group that believed in and practiced the ‘art’ of communication with the dead through psychic mediums. Boland explores both the environment that allowed for the occurrence, and the occurrence itself.

View more of Boland’s work at www.erinboland.com

Susan Main, Front Seat Frontier, 2012

Susan Main, Front Seat Frontier, 2012

Susan Main, Adistance no metter how close, 2012

Susan Main, Tiny Blips of Sight, 2012

January 2013

The Usual Wilderness

Using systematic and chance explorations of the landscape, light and language, Susan Main examines the wildness of attention and perception through video, drawing and painting. Gathering seconds of light, opening the camera to one yard of ground, pairing the breath with a view of the horizon, her work draws simple boundaries in time and space as a way to orient under the elusive, shifting conditions of everyday natural phenomena, individual concentration and the limits of mediating tools. Presenting a landscape that fluctuates between containment and release, focus and dissolution, attachment and sacrifice, Main offers an everyday wilderness teetering on the threshold of perception.

Susan Main received an MFA in Painting from the University of Maryland at College Park and an MFA in Interactive Media and Digital Arts from the
University of Maryland Baltimore County. Her work has been exhibited
nationally and internationally including telematic collaborations with artists in Afghanistan. Main’s work is in numerous collections. She teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

View more of Main’s work at www.susanmain.net

Nina Ozbey, Colette

Nina Ozbey, Gilded Serenade

Nina Ozbey, Looking Glass

Nina Ozbey, Kings Gold

Nina Ozbey, Begin Again

Nina Ozbey, -Amethyst Trail

January 2013

New Work

Nina Ozbey’s is about spontaneity, about herself up. In her ongoing series of non-objective paintings, Ozbey let go of subject matter to explore composition, color and line, blending elements of design with intuition. For the artist, it is all about the process of putting paint onto canvas or paper and the choices that unfold as each work builds and evolves.

Working off the first brushstroke, for often that dictates the rest of the work, Ozbey takes pleasure in making marks, observing how each stroke relates to and energizes the next. The paintings are records of the brushes’ actions, webs of gestures that embrace something new and unseen.

In the end, the artist seeks to discover something fresh in each work, unlike anything she has encountered before. The results are not about communicating something specific or narrative, but derive from a place without rules. Freed from realism, these paintings possess a raw sense of movement and joy for the artist and the viewer.

View Ozbey’s works at www.ninaozbey.com