Kelly Mark PICA, Letraset vinyl transfer lettering on archival mat board 30 x 30 inches, framed
Kelly Mark
Letraset Drawings
November 1 to December 31, 2024
“The dry transfer display typefaces known as Letraset entered the market in 1961, and remained in use until computers made paste-up layout obsolete. Today, Letraset has a more esoteric status and is chiefly used by model builders and hobbyists. The self-adhesive letters, graphic symbols, and numerals are applied by burnishing individual characters onto a surface, then peeling away their vellum backing, It is a laborious process requiring patience and care, demands typical of the working methods favored by Kelly Mark.
“Drawing may be thought of as the recording or developing of visual ideas. Mark refers to her Letraset works as ‘drawings.’ While this designation situates her deployment of ready-made vinyl characters among historical practices of creative mark-making, it also admits the less-serious connotation of doodling or sketching, which Mark says she prefers. The Letraset drawings imply that typography communicates culturally-specific preferences. Through her seemingly idle play with letterforms, Mark channels the modernist formal syntaxes found in Constructivism, Dada, Futurism, even Lettrism—all of which incorporate letterforms—in response to the aesthetic genealogy of original Letraset font design. Perhaps such art historical erudition is best worn lightly by one who take pleasure in the sensual allure of broken language.” —Ingrid Jenkner Beyond Words (exhibition catalog) Mount Saint Vincent University Gallery, Halifax
>LINKS TO THE NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER SPOTLIGHTS
Patte Loper
Laboratory for Other Worlds
September 1 to October 31, 2024
An exhibition at the Bellevue Arts Museum in four parts: Cthonos, a multimedia video installation, a Study Center, Plant Communication Devices, and Psychic Corporeal Maps. The exhibition is a series of imagination exercises to de-center the human individual and to create space for non-human perspectives. Viewers push past the limits of objectivity and rationality to experience the installation as a set of tools for understanding expanded ways of being with the wider world.
>LINKS TO THE SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER SPOTLIGHTS
Ray Beldner Such Small Hands #13, collage on paper mounted on panel, 12 x 12 inches
Ray Beldner
Such Small Hands
July 1 to August 31, 2024
The two-month Spotlight focused on a series of 13 small abstract collage works on panel, each measuring 12 by 12 inches.
Ray Beldner is a sculptor and mixed media artist whose work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and can be found in many public and private collections including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and the Federal Reserve Board, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Oakland Museum of California, the San Jose Museum of Art. The work is in several corporate collections as well: Saks Fifth Ave, Bain Capital, McKesson Corporation, and Ryan Associates.
> LINKS TO THE JULY AND AUGUST SPOTLIGHTS
Lucas Kelly Untitled PCfN #10, 2020, oil on canvas, 9 x 12 inches
Lucas Kelly
Works on Canvas in Collaboration with the PCfN
May 1 to June 30, 2025
Lucas Kelly’s work is an exploration of memory, its fragility, and its reconstructive nature. His pieces consider the psychological need for linear narrative when replaying scenes from one’s personal history. In 2019 Kelly was named as the Inaugural Artist in Residence at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics (PCfN). “Since the residency, I’ve been able to devote some studio time to research with neuroscientists on art and the brain. This has me returning to oil painting. I developed a color system that is used to visualize emotional responses to aesthetic experiences. Given my interest in memory as a subject this study felt connected to my work. As the Center is using this system, I've been making paintings that also use the system in these abstract paintings. They don’t illustrate specific narratives from the study as much as focus on emotional connections. I use this color system to access my own narratives and combine them into these images.”
>LINK TO THE SPOTLIGHT
David Willburn Tahoka, 2022, acrylic, fabric, woven canvas, woven tarpaulin on wood panel, 21 x 18 x 1 inches
David Willburn
Potter County Seat
March 1 to April 31, 2025
A gay man raised in the panhandle plains of Texas, David Willburn’s experience of vast open landscapes, shaped by wind and violent storms, informs his painterly abstractions. In each composition, individualized shapes encounter one another in flattened visual fields, appearing like meteorological diagrams or agricultural maps where the land is viewed from a bird's-eye perspective. The artist’s colors and methods, including blushing pinks and collaged sections of woven fabrics, signal both his queerness and an interest in blending craft media with art-making traditions. His mixed-media paintings invite viewers to imagine a place where personal agency triumphs over the corrosive effects of discrimination.
Kelda Van Patten Beneath an ordinary glance dwells an explosive (after Mary Ruefle) 2022, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 300gsm Baryta Satin Paper, 20 x 26 inches, edition of 7
Kelda Van Patten
Fern Mania
February 1 to 28, 2022
“These photography-based works are part of a new series, Fern Mania, that I started in October 2021 at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology during a month-long Blue Sky/Sitka Photography Residency. I merged dozens of photographs of the [Sitka Spruce-Western Hemlock] forest understory with simulacra and kitsch. My process started with a handheld flash and various colored gels to take pictures of mushrooms, banana slugs, and western sword fern fronds, one of the most abundant understory plants. The images were then printed, cut up, and taped to an artificial Boston fern that I used as an armature and placed against a black velvet backdrop. I lit the entire tableaux with strobe lights and re-photographed the temporary construction. I also added layers to the pictures in post-production, where they merge with digital material. Through these iterations, I challenge myself and the viewer to question perceptions of nature, kitsch, and what we think we are seeing while imagining something beyond.”
>LINK TO THE SPOTLIGHT
Kelda Van Patten The table laid before the party...the bones beneath the green carpet of evenly cut grass (the sadness of green, after Mary Ruefle) 2021, archival pigment print, 30 x 30 inches, edition of 3
Kelda Van Patten
Always in Flower and in Fruit
January 1 to 31, 2022
“My photographs sometimes nod to 17th-century Dutch still-life paintings by provoking symbolic readings of the Vanitas and Memento Mori, which both reference the fragility of life. I also allude to the process of the photographic medium. Once each still life is lit and photographed, I continue the work in a digital darkroom, such as Adobe Photoshop. The colors I use frequently relate to the stereotypically feminine, such as glittery pink tape, deep red artificial cherries, flashes of hot pink light, and layers of bright purple construction paper. I subvert these colors with torn, folded, and cut-up layers of nostalgic dusty rose velvet, deep dark shadows, and bits of blood red. These hues represent the psychological, emotional, and corporeal expressions of loss, juxtaposing the overly saturated hues that bring to mind the toxic cheeriness of trendy mass-market design, which is so often digitally enhanced with intent to conceal.”