Scott Fife Hummingbirds (pink) 2009, Sugar lift, spitbite, and aqua tint intaglio print, 27 x 21 inches, edition of 10 (detail)
Presence Scott Fife
December 1 to December 31, 2024
Spotlighting two limited edition prints by the artist .
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Ray Beldner
cut, arrange, analyze, change, glue, mount, varnish
November 1 to November 30, 2024
“I make my work with images mined from art history books, auction catalogs, art magazines, and posters. I am drawn to the shapes, colors and textures in other artist's work, which I then deconstruct to create wholly new forms and narratives. Through this process, I play with the tension between figuration and abstraction and I’m interested in how 2D forms can occupy, define and create space.
“I find the medium of collage unendingly fascinating. Utilizing its fluid, improvisational capabilities, I’ve made works ranging from small collages on paper to large-scale collage assemblages and free-standing collage sculptures.”
>AVAILABLE WORK
Ray Beldner Oblong Sins, 2020, archival pigment prints on paper, mounted on wood panel, 40 x 40 x 1.5 inches
Michelle Kloehn 0834, from Unseen series, 2009, unique tintypes, 16 x 20 inches
From the Flatfiles Michele Kloehn
October 1 to October 31, 2024
From our inventory, these dark and mysterious photographs on metal are the perfect representation of the moment in which we currently live. In reviewing an exhibition of these works at Platform in 2014, Jen Graves wrote in The Stranger, “the photographs feel like fresh secrets in a foreign language. Kloehn's art raises the hairs on the neck.”
The artist said about this series of unique photographs “for me the power in photography lies in a middle ground between light and shadow, abstraction and representation, between what we think we see and what we want to see. In the studio, I alternate between making small sculptures and working with light itself. I shoot the sculptures using the Wet Plate Collodion method, a 19th century photographic technique that produces an instant image—a process similar to the immediacy of a 20th century Polaroid, though more primitive, physical and open to chance. I might start with a piece of paper, some tape, and a mirror and end with unique images of flying saucer-like shapes that both flatten and extend space. A mark can be both the edge of a mirror and a long billowy line of chemistry. I am exploring the limits of photography and its processes; the difference between taking and making, image and object.”
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Marc Dombrosky Interior Ether
August 1 to September 30, 2024
Because no one’s watching and it’s keeping us sane.
—Shannon Eakins
The flower of distance is blooming. I want you to look through this window and tell me what you see: inconclusive gestures, illusory objects, failed shapes . . . . Go to the window as if you’d been preparing for this your entire life.
—Alejandra Pizarnik
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Marc Dombrosky Untitled (09), 2020, watercolor on paper. 7.5 x 7.5 inches
Lauren Grossman Random Rubble, 2020, porcelain, glaze, stoneware, brass, steel, rubber, 14 x 7 x 7 inches
Lauren Grossman Placeholder
June 1 to July 31, 2024
“About three years ago I began to play around with the text and imagery of the Tower of Babel. The story appears in just a few sentences in Genesis, tucked between the Flood and a listing of the generations of Noah’s sons. Stopping by the collaborative construction site, the Lord decides to prevent the peoples of the earth from sharing a common language and ambition. Why this hobbling would be a positive thing seems murky, especially in our current climate of violently splintered communication.
“The pieces in Placeholder indulge my ongoing interest in the physical manifestation of language—translating printed word into sculptural form. Many of these towers are composed of their own descriptions. Word made flesh. Labor is an important part of my practice. The long hours invested in carving, cutting, stretching, and stacking texts become a kind of haptic learning process for me. I hope the labor comes through in the finished work as a blush of earnestness.”
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Adam Ekberg Balloon Tree, 2018, archival inkjet print, 24 x 20 / 40 x 30 / 50 x 40 inches
Adam Ekberg Actions on the
Outskirts of Town
May 1 to 31, 2020
In his recent works Adam Ekberg photographs displaced objects and misused materials that have been activated by a human presence that is absent from the frame, thereby calling into question the agency of these events.
“I strive to create photographs that—in an abstract or even absurdist way—visualize commonalities with the human condition, namely: temporality, ephemerality, and presence even through absence.
“My photographs begin as sketches that I pin to the wall of my studio and then I do whatever is necessary to make this event occur. This has led me to develop some idiosyncratic skill sets that I will only use once: crafting a basic catapult from a plank and a five-gallon bucket to launch a lawn chair over the plains of the Midwest, propelling a roller skate down a country road generating a line of shaving cream in its wake, or replicating with cocktail umbrellas the exact diameter of a beach umbrella’s shadow.
“The events I generate must exist in the world at least long enough to be photographed. My studio walls are covered with sketches, and it always feels like a small victory when I replace a sketch with a small print of an actualized event.”
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Melissa Pokorny Who, 2019, dye transfer print on polyester, vinyl, silicone, aluminum-epoxy composite, aluminum utility hook; 22 x 18 x 7 inches
Melissa Pokorny More than You Know
April 1 to 30, 2020
“I’m interested in the sense of place, the longue durée, histories, the non-human turn, deep time, and the impossible challenge of making meaning that does not center the human. My work addresses these ideas through photography, sculpture, textiles, and installation. My happy place and research is rooted in experiencing encounters with big, windy, feral places.
“Since returning to the Midwest after years spent in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve been continually bemused by the often shared opinion that this is the “middle of nowhere”, a place devoid of nature, natural beauty, or a sense of place. On the contrary, these big horizons and horizontal places are teeming with stories and presences. They may seem empty to the casual observer, but they are far from emptied. Presence through absence is a funny idea. The non-human beings that persist here are often unseen, overlooked, or rendered invisible through scale. A disinterest in the commonplace, and a pervasive cultural appetite for spectacle and the imminently photogenic scenic landscape further troubles this view. My work attempts to reconnect with these places, through other ways of knowing and deep looking.”
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David Willburn Eight Parts
March 1 to 31, 2020
“My studio work and process is at the intersection of craft and fine art, and within that space I explore traditions of drawing, painting, and sculpture. The process of making mixed-media paintings and collages begins with images and ideas culled from contemporary culture and politics—more specifically influenced by photographs or events I have seen or experienced. History, personal stories, social and cultural symbolism, or concepts derived from mass media are starting points that are filtered through layers of abstraction and analysis as a way of stripping away the familiarity and objectness of things and situations. I think these reimagined ideas and the resulting compositions are loaded with more possibility. In these abstractions I find new narratives, and I look for ways to exploit materials, reshaping and repurposing things through form and subject.”
David Willburn Quilted Rainbow Scaffold on Cloud, 2019, acrylic, enamel, fabric on wood panel, 14 x 11 inches
Following the Line
Anonymous
February 1 to 29, 2020
New graphite drawings on paper.
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Anonymous Untitled (17), 2018, graphite on Strathmore Bristol 400 paper, 22 x 30 inches
Ariana Page Russell Dubonnet, 2008, archival pigment print, 13 x 19 inches, edition of 5
Ariana Page Russell
January 1 to 31, 2020
“A body becomes an index of passing time. Skin reveals how bones shift, muscles loosen, freckles and wrinkles form, and bruises appear. I am interested in this as a fashion of skin, including the way a blush decorates one’s cheek, freckles form constellations on an arm, or hair creates sheen on skin’s matte surface. Skin also protects us while revealing internal emotions, offering a translucent space for adornment. I create images that explore the skin as a document of human experience, using my own hypersensitive flesh to illustrate the ways we expose, express, adorn and articulate ourselves.”