Matthew McLaughlin

June 2—July 2, 2017

Scenes from Suburbia

My work explores the relationship we have with our surrounding environment, both natural and manmade, suburban and urban, and how we interact and observe the spaces we inhabit and alter for our own wants and needs. My interest comes from my own observations of the places I have lived and the unique aspects that make them different from each other, while simultaneously, finding the ideas or aspects that are congruent. Growing up in a planned suburban community made me observant of the unusual aspects and components that characterize community.

Through image manipulation and the re-contextualizing of symbols, my work creates new perspectives for the viewer to consider when confronted with their own relationship with the environment. The work strives to have a conversation with the audience about their own awareness of space, want of things and societal norms, by not forcing a specific viewpoint. My art aims to bring forth questions that spark an inner dialogue that may or may not affect their perspective on their environment.

“Scenes from Suburbia” is a series of photo-realistic drawings that explore and investigate elements of my suburban neighborhood that create interesting stories when isolated from their “natural settings”. The work began as an exploration of leaf bags left on the corner and the scenes they seemed to be set in, but over time it has expanded into an exploration of detritus that has come to build a larger narrative about the idea of suburbia.

Matthew McLaughlin received his BFA degree in Fine Arts from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2007 and Design and his MFA degree in Printmaking from Arizona State University in 2011. Matthew has shown his work nationally and internationally and his work is in the collections of the Zuckerman Museum of Art among others. He has received numerous awards including the Maryland State Art Council Individual Artist Award in Works on Paper. He is a lecturer of printmaking and foundations at the University of Maryland in College Park, MD and teaches workshops on different printmaking techniques at regional print shops.

www.matthewtmclaughlin.com

June 2 – July 2, 2017

Museum Encounters

Drawing and scale is always a starting point for Subler’s work. It represents that intimate moment between self, the material and ultimately the viewer. Museum Encounters has been influenced and shaped by different bodies of work, Domenico Tiepolo New Testament drawings and Mughal and Rajput paintings. What linked these two bodies of work for Subler was the clarity of line and scale. Both Tiepolo’s and the Mughal and Rajput drawings and paintings are diminutive in scale. Where Tiepolo’s drawings represent a linear narrative, the Rajput paintings combine several different narratives into a single composition. The problem, for Subler was how to bring his use of the figure together with those two very different drawing and painting traditions. The museum environment seemed to be the perfect setting.

Subler’s drawings embrace a narrative, albeit a truncated one, that the museum visitor constructs. The art museum’s fractured discontinuity is a place where visitors have to navigate an artificially constructed world in which the museum narrative is interrupted from gallery to gallery. His work present a complex accumulation of fragments and viewpoints. It is puzzling for the figures that inhabit these works, reminding us of our own museum encounters.

Craig Allen Subler was born in Dayton, Ohio. He received his BFA from the Dayton Art Institute and his M.A. and M.F. A. at the university of Iowa. He is the recipient of numerous awards and foundations grants. His works have been seen in over 70 exhibitions and he has received seven public commissions. He is the recipient of the James C. Olson Professorship at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He currently lives and works in Washington, D.C. and West Virginia.

craigallensubler.com

In collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute, this exhibition presents three artists from the Olnick Spanu Collection who will also be part of the inaugural exhibition at Magazzino Italian Art, a new warehouse art space located in the Hudson Valley, NY. Dedicated to Post-war and Contemporary Italian Art, Magazzino will open to the public by appointment on June 28, 2017.

For this exhibition Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu have selected Bagnoli, Bianchi and Salvadori, whose work is imbued with the illustrious history of Italian art as well as a profound understanding of today’s world and man’s search for meaning. These artists represent the next generation, following the Arte Povera movement, who continue to explore the human condition and the greater cosmos, and are an example of the artistic talent flourishing in Italy today. We hope this exhibition will serve to inform the US audience of the relevance of Contemporary Italian Art as well as present 3 influential artists who are lesser known in the United States.

The Olnick Spanu Collection
Established by art advocates Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, The Olnick Spanu Collection is one of the most expansive collections of Post-war Italian Art and Design in the United States. In development since the early 1990s, the art collection is centered around works by conceptual and contemporary Italian artists with a strong focus on the artists associated with the Arte Povera movement. In addition, the Olnick Spanu Collection includes a thoughtfully curated collection of Murano Glass, a breathtaking tribute to design, color and light, featuring over 500 hand-blown works from the 20th and 21st century.

Marco Bagnoli
Born in Empoli in 1949 , Bagnoli has long been a presence at major international exhibitions including the Venice Biennial (1982, 1993,1997), Documenta in Kassel (1982 and 1992), and Sonsbeek in Arnhem (1986). From the mid-1970s to today, Marco Bagnoli has had solo exhibitions at prominent institutions like De Appel, Amsterdam (1980 and 1984), Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneve (1985), Castello di Rivoli (1992), Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea ‘Luigi Pecci’, Prato (1995) and Madre, Naples (2015). He has pursued and continues to pursue his own very personal path, creating site-specific installations in places of exceptional artistic, architectural, religious and spiritual value. His works can be found in important international collections, and permanent installations of his pieces have been commissioned by public institutions and private patrons.

Domenico Bianchi
Born in Rome in 1955, where he lives and works today, Bianchi attended the city’s Accademia di Belle Arti, and at age 22 made his debut with a solo exhibition at Salvatore Ala Gallery in New York. In the years that followed, his work was shown at the Galerie Swart in Amsterdam, Yvon Lambert in Paris, Gian Enzo Sperone in Rome and New York, L.A. Louver Gallery in Los Angeles and Galleria Christian Stein in Turin and Milan. Bianchi’s first museum exhibition was at the Museo of Rivoli in 1989. He exhibited in the Italian Pavilion at the 45th Venice Biennale (1993), in Arte e Alchimia at the 42nd Venice Biennale (1986), and at Aperto 84 at the 41st Venice Biennale (1984).

Remo Salvadori
Born in Cerreto Guidi, near Vinci in the province of Florence, in 1947, Salvadori currently lives and works in Milan. An exponent of the generation following Arte Povera and Conceptual Art, Salvadori opens up a new space in the conception and formulation of the work, in which art is experienced as a “revelation”. The attention directed toward time and space in his work, as in his own life, intersects with reflections upon the essence of color, on the nature of pure metal, and on the role of the observer. Salvadori’s important solo exhibitions include those at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2005); Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato (1997); Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble (1991); and the Italian Cultural Institute and The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (1987).

www.magazzino.art

May 5-28,2017

4×4 Dreams

Why am I compelled to draw trucks raising hell, dirtbikes peeling out, and army helicopters racing across the canvas? I grew up on a farm in rural Kentucky, deep in the sticks. We only had a handful of neighbors. There were very few children around that were my age, except my siblings.
We weren’t allowed to watch much television.

Until I got my driver’s license, I spent my summers on the farm. The most exciting thing around was the monstrously large and loud machinery used to work the farm: the jacked-up 4×4 trucks and the off-road dirtb ikes and 4-wheelers. In the country, everything is very quiet and still. So when a mammoth combine harvester thunders by your house, shooting up big black plumes of smoke and rumbling out a deep raspy diesel groan, it gets noticed.

Our driveway merged with the highway at a sharp right angle. To make this turn, cars had to slow down almost to a stop. Some locals used to this as an opportunity to burn out, loudly. Thick woods lined nearly the entire perimeter of our property. We couldn’t see our neighbors, but we could hear their 4-wheelers and dirtbikes.

We lived in between Fort Campbell and Fort Knox. Military planes and helicopters frequently buzzed our house. When I heard them coming, I’d drop what I was doing and run outside to stare in awe. I still run out to watch the airshow when I’m visiting the farm.

It’s common for people to think of vehicles’ relationship to humanity, and, in a broader sense, the natural world, as an antagonistic one. 4×4 Dreams is my attempt to capture the primal beauty I see in these machines.

Joseph Crawford Pile grew up on a pig farm in rural Kentucky and was raised in the house his great-grandfather built in 1874. His great-grandfather bought the land with the wealth passed down from his grandfather, who received a land grant in Kentucky for his service in the Revolutionary War.

Pile dreams about the farm every night. Usually the dreams are a mix of family members and peers from his formative years, all set on the farm with a desperate apocalyptic theme. He has spent his life trying to interpret these dreams, to gain insight into his personal, emotional, and psychic identity and his place in the world.

Pile’s mother is an artist, and as a child he watched her paint portraits, landscapes and still lifes. She fostered his interest in the arts and enrolled him into summer art programs as a teenager, which lead him to art school as a young adult.

Pile lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

joecrawfordpile.com

May 5-28, 2017

Desire and Its Constraints

Wills’ current collage-based and sculptural works are inspired by the tools of desire: wishes, hopes, effort and intention. An evolving understanding of her roles as a parent, child, sibling, spouse, citizen, friend and lover, as well as her awareness of competing external expectations for each of these roles, directly shapes the content and structure of her works.

The works in this exhibit draw imagery from celestial sources; the moon, stars and cosmos recur throughout in varying forms. This imagery, however, is eclipsed by its materiality: stars are rendered as abraded holes in sandpaper, and deep space in a rough wood tree branch. Wills chooses materials for their metaphoric or associative meanings; matchsticks, for example, suggest a continuum from latent potential to residue, while sandpaper contains a tactile recognition of its erosive function. The collages pair traditional drawing materials with the nontraditional materials found in her sculpture and incorporate her longstanding interest in poetic language.

Julie Wills is an interdisciplinary artist working in the expanded field of sculpture, including installation, collage works on paper, performance, video and site-specific practices. She holds an MFA from the University of Colorado, and an MA in art criticism from the University of Montana. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Jentel Foundation, PLAYA, and the Hambidge Center, among others, and has exhibited her work widely. In addition to her individual studio practice, Wills has worked since 2004 as one of four members of The Bridge Club collaborative.

Wills is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Washington College in Chestertown, MD.

www.juliewills.com