Scottish-born New York artist
Rory Donaldson manages to stretch his photographs with a digital
process pulling the central subject to all four corners of the
image, creating large blocks of color. Donaldson tends to focus on
big-city icons, such as subway platforms, traffic intersections, or
graffiti-marked doors and walls. These stripes of pure color force
the viewer to observe the perspective and study of depth emanating
from within.
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Markus Linnenbrink's work physically and
conceptually straddles the line between painting and sculpture. His
newest venture is with furniture. In collaboration with Artware
Editions, Linnenbrink has created one-of-a-kind console tables. The
top surface of the table is hand-designed by the artist who has
drilled a "constellation" of holes and then filled them with bright
acrylic paint. The end affect is essentially a painting turned into
a tabletop. Each table in this edition of 20 is unique and is signed
and numbered by the artist.
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New on the scene, Lauren DiCioccio makes paintings
on a sheet of frosted mylar laid over a magazine page. She assigns a
color to every letter and applies tiny dots of paint over each
letter and number on the page, creating a unique color code and
therefore a different palette for each work of art. DiCioccio works
with embroidery as
well.
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Another artist fascinated with embroidery is Mark R.
Smith. Pilgrimages, migrations, and all kinds of mass movements
inspired his latest series of fabric collage paintings. His source
material is always the news, both current events that inform his
subject matter and the images he actually cuts out of papers and
magazines. Although all of Smith's images are recycled, like the
fabric he incorporates in his process, the result is original. His
procedure, which entails stencils, transfers, reversals and careful
planning, yields a well-organized grid of high-art modernist
principles.
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Street art is now making its way into traditional art
fairs and museums. Shepard Fairey has taken it to a whole new level,
selling out his entire booth with his politically charged silkscreen
designs. Originally emerging from the skateboarding scene,
Fairey attended RISD where he earned his degree in illustration. He
continues to create provocative large-scale and small collections of
screen prints, stencils, album covers, and mixed media pieces filled
with humor and irony. Fairey is also widely known for his recent
series of Obama posters supporting the President-elect's candidacy.
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Photographer Sharon Core initially made a reputation
for herself by re-creating Wayne Thiebaud's infamous
dessert displays. In her latest body of work called "Early
American", she is inspired by 19th-century painter Raphaelle Peale
and his tabletop still-lifes of fruit. Core's small color
photographs artfully capture the carefully arranged lemons, apples
and other combinations of food and flowers in Peale's paintings. To
accurately document these visual images, Core artificially ages
the fruit when necessary and sources the antique bowls, plates and
utensils that appear in her
photographs.
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Polly Apfelbaum's new series of "Love" woodblock monoprints are
no less intense than her previous works. Prior to placing the blocks
in the frame, she individually inks each one before finalizing their
position. Once situated, the blocks are pressed into handmade sheets
of Japanese paper to create her Pop-like designs. Her work has been
included in numerous museum collections such as the Dallas Museum of
Art, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Armand Hammer
Museum of
Art.
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Ross Racine currently lives and works in New York. He imagines
large McMansion communities as strange exaggerations by hand-drawing
them directly onto his computer and then printing the result on his
inkjet printer. There is no photography or scanned materials
involved but through digital processes his pictures become very
convincing. The subject of Racine's work can be interpreted as
models for planned communities or aerial views of fictional suburbs.
However, he is, in fact, referencing the computer as a tool for
urban planning and commenting on society's occupation with
transforming our natural landscape into a suburban culture.
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Christopher H. Martin lives and works from his
studio on a limestone cliff in Texas, gaining his inspiration
from observing the veining of a marble slab, the alternating
colors of the sand dunes, rivers, wood grain, anything rooted in
nature. He manipulates acrylic paint on Lucite panels to express
this visual take on the universe.
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British-born Andy Harper's paintings are an obvious
reference to nature with his images of plant life, vegetation, and
coral organisms. His process of mark-making is an intense
combination of traditional brushstrokes, streams of air from a
compressor, the use of homemade tools and his fingers. His work
becomes a type of animation, where the manipulation of the paint
gives way to a narrative rather than a passive look at a re-enacted
world.
