FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: John Addison, 505-992-0711

Solo Exhibitions: John Garrett & Irene Kung

May 4 – June 2, 2012

Santa Fe – Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art is pleased to present its first solo shows of the 2012 season.  Opening concurrently, May 4, and continuing through June 2, we’re featuring New Work from mixed media sculptor John Garrett, and Gli Alberi (Italian for The Trees) large scale color photographs by Irene Kung.  The opening reception is Friday, May 4, 5-7pm.

Using discarded, recycled, non-precious materials, John Garrett‘s new sculptures transform and elevate his materials into a new realm.  This dynamic body of work consists of large-scale pieces hanging straight down from the ceiling.  Garrett calls them “Chain Columns”.  His Chain Columns employ hundreds of densely hung individual elements, such as keys, bead strings, or razor blades, looped together one on top of the other.  Garrett explains, “While each piece of the whole remains a distinct object, their aggregate becomes something else.  For example, the hard rigid objects can take on a soft organic quality.  Furthermore, these sculptures look as if they grew into being, much like a grape vine, instead of being constructed by the artist’s hand.”

April 6 – 28, 2012

Opening Reception, Friday, April 6, 5-7pm

To welcome the beginning of our exhibition season, our Spring Thaw features a selection of work from artists new from the gallery as well as recent work from its current artists. Every year Chiaroscuro brings in approximately three artists, some emerging, some established, to round out its selection of represented artists.

Our Spring Thaw artists will include Nora Naranjo-Morse, Emmi Whitehorse, Gretchen Wachs, Peter Millett, Mike Stack, and new arrivals Katherine Chang Liu, MarGeaux, and Jack R. Slentz.

Spring Thaw

April 6 – 28, 2012

Opening Reception, Friday, April 6, 5-7pm

Location: Chiaroscuro, 702 ½ & 708 Canyon Road on

Gypsy Alley, Santa Fe, NM 87501, 505-992-0711

April 6 - 28, 2012

Opening Reception, Friday, April 6, 5-7pm

To welcome the beginning of our exhibition season, our Spring Thaw features a selection of work from artists new from the gallery as well as recent work from its current artists. Every year Chiaroscuro brings in approximately five artists, some emerging, some established, to round out its selection of represented artists.

Our Spring Thaw artists will include Nora Naranjo-Morse, Emmi Whitehorse, Gretchen Wachs, Peter Millett, Mike Stack, and new arrivals Katherine Chang Liu, Mar Geaux, and Jack Slentz.

John Garrett – New Work

May 4 - June 2, 2012

Opening Reception, Friday, May 4, 5-7pm

Garrett’s new sculpture takes his unique mixed media vocabulary to a new extreme, exploring forms that explode from a center point and hang freely from the ceiling.  Garrett refers to these dynamic new pieces as “Chain Columns”.  This will be his third solo show at Chiaroscuro.

Irene Kung – Gli Alberi

May 4 - June 2, 2012

Opening Reception, Friday, May 4, 5-7pm

Known for her exquisite large scale architectural photographs, where buildings emerge from a jet-black background, Kung’s second solo show with Chiaroscuro will feature her majestic tree series.  Gli Alberi, Italian for “The Trees”, pays homage to her roots and to these graceful and powerful natural wonders.

Rebecca Bluestone

June 8 – July 8, 2012

Opening Reception, Friday, June 8, 5-7pm

Bluestone’s works are like abstract paintings in silk, each thread hand-dyed by the artist and woven into tapestries on a cotton warp.  They inspire tranquil contemplation with delicate gradations of vibrant color and beautifully resolved compositions.  This is Bluestone’s second solo show at Chiaroscuro, and will expand on her recent Triptych Series, and individual gradation pieces.

Australian Contemporary Indigenous Art – Part II

July 13 – September 8, 2012

Opening Reception, Friday, July 13, 5-7pm

Following the success of Chiaroscuro’s 2010 Aboriginal show, Part II heralds the return of work by contemporary Australian Indigenous artists, in partnership with the Vivien Anderson Gallery in Melbourne, Australia.  Deep ties to the earth, tradition, and culture mark these works as incredible narrative abstractions unfold in vivid colors, shapes and symbols. This group show will feature new pieces from over a dozen major Aboriginal artists. Names to be announced in early June, show curated by aboriginal art expert Vivien Anderson.

Rose B. Simpson

August 10 – September 8, 2012

Preview Reception, Saturday, August 11, 5-7pm

Opening Reception, Friday August 17, 5-7pm

Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara) is an exceptional young artist from Northern New Mexico. Simpson’s second solo show at Chiaroscuro will feature her latest body of work, exploring themes of personal and cultural identity and pushing the boundaries of ceramic technique and form.

Emmi Whitehorse

August 10 – September 8, 2012

Preview Reception, Saturday, August 11, 5-7pm

Opening Reception, Friday August 17, 5-7pm

Abstract painter Emmi Whitehorse (Navajo) continues to define new territory with her progressive abstractions of “a moment in the landscape.” Whitehorse, from Whitehorse Lake, NM, is an accomplished painter whose work is included in most major contemporary Native American museum collections as well as numerous public and private collections. This is Whitehorse’s fifth solo show at Chiaroscuro.

Gretchen Wachs

September 14 – October 13, 2012

Opening Reception, Friday, September 14, 5-7pm

The ceramic sculpture and encaustic paintings of Gretchen Wachs have gone through many transformations over her long productive career. This exhibition will include the contemporary totems of the Arboles and Torso series as well as a selection of two-dimensional work. Wachs has hinted she will incorporate cast glass into her large scale ceramic forms, adding another color, texture and form to the whole.

Nora Naranjo-Morse

September 14 – October 13, 2012

Opening Reception, Friday, September 14, 5-7pm

Nora Naranjo-Morse (Santa Clara) has been developing this new body of work for years, alongside her work in documentary film and major sculptural installation commissions. Employing recycled materials as diverse as wire and string, Naranjo-Morse’s work will show a transformation of imagery and subject matter while maintaining her natural gift with the visual arts. This is Naranjo-Morse’s second solo show with Chiaroscuro.

Holiday Group Show – TBA

November 23 – December 29, 2012

Artist, Rick Bartow, poses by one of his art pieces entitled "From Nothing Coyote Creates Himself," during his exhibit opening at the Missoula Art Museum in November.

MISSOULA — Wiyot and Yurok artist Rick Bartow believes everyone is given a gift and his is making marks on paper.

“That’s what the creator gave me to do,” Bartow said during a lecture at the Missoula Art Museum. “And I don’t pretend to understand it.”

Yet the artist’s work and latest exhibition displays a celebrated career and work that spans 20 years. Bartow’s nationally traveling survey exhibition “Dog’s Journey: A 20 Year Survey” includes work executed from 1991 to 2011. Most of the work features his relationship with 2-D work but Bartow is also versed in crafts sculpture, drawings, prints, ceramics, mixed media and paintings.

“The dog’s journey…reminds me of Coyote. He’s always going. They needed a title and I thought it sounded good,” Bartow said of the exhibit’s name. “In a couple of weeks I’m going to be 65 and I’m still going.”

Bartow’s was born in Newport, Ore., in 1946 and is of Wiyot and Yurok heritage. He graduated from Western Oregon University with a degree in secondary art education in 1969. His artwork is part of permanent collections at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, Ind.; the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.; the Hallie Ford Museum in Salem, Ore.; the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Ariz.; and the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Ore.

The exhibit “Dog’s Journey: A 20 Year Survey” is being hosted by the Lynda M. Frost Contemporary American Art Museum. Native American artists such as Fritz Scholder, Joe Feddersen and Lillian Pitt inspire him in addition to Marc Chagall, Francis Bacon, Odilon Redon and Horst Janssen in his artwork.

“This exhibition demonstrates that Bartow is at full stride and at the top of his game,” read a panel at the exhibit at MAM. “Sharing a unique body of work rooted in his own identity, and openly and generously citing his influences while remaining true to his own expression.”

Bartow’s work has been described as “dream-like” as he often draws from myth, creation stories and animal spirits such as Coyote, Crow, Hawk, and Dog.

Bartow’s style often allows viewers to develop their own interpretations of his pieces.

“If I am lucky people will buy (my work) and get it,” Bartow said. “And I don’t have to go into it.”

Bartow shared with the crowd of about 40 people that a journalist asked him which piece was his favorite piece.

“Tonight it’s this one,” he confessed as he stepped in front of the painting called “Bear’s Journey” made in 2010 with pastel, charcoal and granite on paper.

“I think it’s the blue boat and the bears laughing,” he added.

Bartow noted his love of pastels and referred to it as “beautiful dirt.”

This art medium was heavily utilized during a master class taught by Bartow the next day at the MAM.

The palm of Bartow’s right hand was caked black with pastels as he talked to the class of 19 consisting of art students and artists. Bartow encouraged those in attendance to let their drawings evolve through erasing and layering. The class was not centered on technique and skill but on the investment in the art making process.

“Little marks, big marks, very satisfying,” Bartow said as he made a long, quick swipe with a bright red pastel. He shared that he liked the vibrant. “It’s a little charge of something here,” he said of the red line.

“I saw a video of Bartow working on YouTube and I was blown away,” said Pat Hurley of Ravalli, Mont. Hurley is enrolled in an art class at Salish Kootenai College in Pablo, Mont. and signed up for the class to learn more about Bartow’s techniques.

“I love the combined realism and abstract,” Hurley said. “Just putting marks and having emotion (dictate) what they do. I’ve never done that before. It’s a real experience for me.”

“It’s free-flowing and that’s what I like,” said Jay Laber of St. Ignatius, Mont. as he worked on his second piece during class. “It’s more of a feeling than art. I’m having a lot of fun with it.”

That emotional openness and freedom was a technique Bartow stressed as he worked on two pieces in front of the room.

“The main thing about drawing is being in attendance. It’s like a ceremony, sometimes you don’t know the words but you sing along anyways,” he said as he smudged orange in the corner of the hanging paper. “You start feeling it here in your chest and it’s innately yours.”

- Tetona Dunlap, Reznet News

Bread & Circus

December 9, 2011 – January 7, 2012

Santa Fe – Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Michele Mikesell’s Bread & Circus, an exhibition of ten new paintings running December 9 through January 7.  There will be no opening reception.

Mikesell’s newest characters range from Little Tack Spitter (old circus vernacular for ‘one who posts bills’) to the impressive and ethereal The Ring Master. Mikesell explains, “In these ten paintings I have returned to my favorite subject – the circus. The title for the body of work, ‘Bread & Circus’, is taken from a quote by the Roman writer Juvenal in reference to the government staging elaborate spectacles and passing out food to pacify the public: ‘Two things only the people anxiously desire — bread and circuses.’ “

Her new technique incorporates brushing, wiping, scraping and sanding paint, resulting in a beautifully textured surface which adds depth and personality to her characters.  This surface is a marked departure from her high gloss paintings of recent years and ties in nicely with her thematic constructs. Mikesell explains, “Irony, contradiction, humor and tragedy are recurring themes in my work and are illustrated not only within the image, but in the actual paint and surface of the painting.  These new paintings illustrate a profound departure from the animal iconography I have used in the past, but I continue to feel I am speaking to the individual viewer about universal human experience.”

Michele Mikesell

Bread & Circus

December 9, 2011 – January 7, 2012

**In calendar listings please list exhibition as “no opening reception.”**

Location: Chiaroscuro, 702 ½ & 708 Canyon Road on

Gypsy Alley, Santa Fe, NM 87501, 505-992-0711

Two artists obsessed with color – but in differing ways – open in a two-man show at Chiaroscuro’s Canyon Road location today.

The bodies of work of Mike Stack and Tim Jag both fall into the geometric abstraction genre, at least according to gallery director John Addison, and use uniform straight lines and slight variations in color to achieve radically different results. However, Stack’s approach is more emotional, and Jag’s more cerebral.

Mike Stack

Stack is a recent addition to Chiaroscuro’s stable of artists. Based in Tucson, Stack has been painting for more than 20 years. He exhibits in Arizona, Philadelphia and New York, and has been a professor of art at Pima Community College in Tucson since 2002. This is his first show in Santa Fe.

“Stack’s paintings are built upon a rigid structure of equidistant horizontal lines painted in slightly varying hues of color,” Addison said. “The palette is carefully considered, providing an endless variation on hue.”

“I would say it’s more abstraction than geometric,” Stack said in a telephone interview. “It’s definitely not biomorphic or anything, so I guess you could call it geometric abstraction. For me, I guess, I am a colorist. Variation in color is almost like an entity to me.

“I spent many years painting from life and wound up having more of an interest in color on its own, and variation on its own,” the artist said. “Eventually I just kind of peeled away everything but the color itself.

“Although the paintings are abstract, there’s very much a relationship to nature,” Stack added. “I like the way these minute variations crackle and how they buzz and how they sit there and shimmer.”

That shimmer of subtle color variations “pretty much confirms what I’m trying to do,” he said. He paints in oil. “It’s a pretty slow-going process,” Stack confirmed. “It’s really hard to paint these paintings, because the values are so close.”

Stack has lived in Tucson 17 years. “It’s the light,” he said. “It’s just fantastic. And back of my house there’s a canyon – the way the light gets trapped here day to day, that’s definitely what draws me.”

He sent six paintings and some drawings to the gallery, “but I’m not sure how many John (Addison) is hanging,” he said. “I think maybe four paintings.”

His work has gotten larger and larger, he said. A couple of the paintings in this show are 76-by-72 inches.

“I was working in the 32-by-32 inch range for a long time, then a friend said, ‘You really have to fall into these paintings,’ so I increased the size, and it actually worked out really well,” he said. “I’m just trying to see what happens next. Every day they just evoke something new. Something about these paintings – they change all the time, under lighting, through time. A lot has to do with the optical mixing that I put forth. I don’t think it fatigues the eye, but they definitely change every time you look at them,” Stack said.

Tim Jag

Jag’s intellectual, linear color experimentations all seem to end in a vector somewhere on the plane, indicative of his fascination with astronomy, “Star Trek” and other visions from the sky. He calls his latest series “Colornovas,” reflective of a star being born or dying.

As with Stack’s, the work relies on thin strips of carefully considered colors, but Jag’s lines join together at a definitive point, forming the nucleus of an ever-expanding color nova. Both large and small scale pieces will be on view. Jag elaborated in a written statement, “The paintings are my way of abstractly using color and symmetry to symbolize celestial movement and experience. Formally, these paintings strive for balance between flat space versus depth, and color sensations that come out of color juxtapositions.”

Jag has exhibited widely across the Southwest. He currently lives in California, after having lived in Santa Fe for a while.

“For me, the act of painting is a process of how the grid (industrial culture) defines itself from the natural world: an inclusive act that brings in cultural media and ephemera from that culture,” the artist has written. “Having an affinity for industrial design and pop culture, I find visual resources as random as the hardware store, the toy store, the produce department at a supermarket, dated textiles and papers, beat-up billboards, highway signs and symbols or the design of a magazine ad. With this in mind, I want my paintings to reflect the way culture organizes and builds upon itself – specifically, the way architecture and infrastructural design separates us from the organic world. As such, symmetrical organizing has become a central issue in the painting process.

Jag has moved from the pop side to a more abstract understanding of his concepts, though.

“This new painting series I am calling ‘Colornovas’ because they are a way for me to visualize an interest in the phenomena of stars within our solar system,” he wrote in an artist’s statement. “The paintings are my way of abstractly using color and symmetry to symbolize celestial movement and experience. At its core these paintings use a single point that all things lead to or fly away from. This interest in stars is multifaceted in its concepts and springs from numerous sources.

“My interest was first sparked by the iconic and symbolic use of sun imagery within culture (like the Japanese flag or 13th-century religious paintings showing rays of light symbolizing spiritual illumination or sun and star symbols in drawings of ancient cultures),” he wrote. “Contemporary sources include the classic scene in the TV series ‘Star Trek’ – when the starship Enterprise takes off and you see the phenomena of streaking stars or the stage-crafted pyrotechnics of light blasting across or behind at a modern rock concert. And there are milder images from nature that show the same patterns in things such as flowers and spider webs. The end result is a reading or redefining of a cultural archetype (star pattern and image).

“Technically, my process includes the use of aggressive mark-making and scratching with inks and sharp tools, re-staining and sanding, symmetrical drawing, and painterly characteristics such as color contrast, plasticity, and multiple layering of colors,” Jag said. “Formally, these paintings strive for balance between flat space versus depth, and color sensations that come out of color juxtapositions.

“Color is a jumping-off point for the paintings where I can keep visual movement going through symmetry and use color as a signifier for a variety of ideas (symbolic and metaphorical),” he added.” I am working on a painting called ‘Red Atomic’ that uses movement and color (red) to capture the burst of an atomic blast or the hot cinnamon flavor of the hard candy called Red’s Atomic Balls. Within the paintings, color is a central issue – how colors work together formally and how I personally distill external color sources into painting content.”

John Geldersma: Black Wings

Chiaroscuro

708 Canyon Road, Santa Fe

John Geldersma, Y Wings, 2011, painted Ponderosa pine, 19 x 47 x 4 inches

JOHN GELDERSMA’S SCULPTURES at Chiaroscuro Gallery are imbued with both the bayou exuberance of his Louisiana background and the minimalist rigor of his East Coast training and early milieu. His work shows a loving give and take with his materials. The dialogue includes scraping, sanding, drilling, burning, painting, and varnishing, but also seems to embody a kind of deep listening to the wood itself. Several pieces in the show are called “cairns,” stacked piles of wood blocks, some on wood bases, others on steel plate bases.

Traditionally, a cairn is a pile of stones stacked as a kind of barrier, signal, or boundary to indicate that a place is considered sacred, or is significant in some way. Built since prehistoric times throughout the world, they were frequently associated with the human figure in cultures as diverse as Inuit and Alpine. Cairns are still in use today, for example to mark trails in U.S. national parks, and in some Buddhist cultures they symbolize the Buddha. I particularly liked the group of three called Hanging Cairn A, B, and C. Suspended from a stout rope attached to a viga, each is composed of blocks of pine wood resembling children’s blocks, but of different sizes and assembled so that they rotate independently, giving each piece a multitude of faces and orientations that can be manipulated by the viewer. This is touchable art and has much to do with the loving touch of its maker. In Square Cairn A and Square Cairn B, although their components do not rotate, this dynamic quality is also at work, arising from varied shapes and sizes, as well as complex, subtle colors in interplay with the innate qualities of the wood.

The verticality of these pieces is in continuity with the poles Geldersma had been making for some time. A number of such poles are included in this exhibit. Asymmetrical, made from found trees or branches, Geldersma’s poles are like totems that a very precocious child might come up with. More than six feet high, painted and incised, some of these arched spires can be rotated on their axes; doing so feels a bit like dancing with a tree. The wing motif, from which the exhibit derives its name, marks a shift in Geldersma’s work during the past five years toward horizontal works.

In several pieces of the Black Wings series, a technique of subtraction of wood from the outer edges creates a wave-like form suggesting movement and tension at the center. Geldersma’s working method seems a very modern version of that archetypal trope of artistic practice we might associate with, say, Michelangelo hewing away the extraneous marble to free the perfect human figure waiting inside. Black Wings #5 consists of three deconstructed aspen logs mounted horizontally one above the other on a wall. Portions of each log are sliced neatly away, as timber might be cut for particular construction purposes. It is just sliced wood with a varnish or burnish on one face and no imaginable function. Yet the viewer is launched into a poetic realm by the very purposelessness of the thing itself. This is the territory of Wallace Stevens’ 1915 poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” or literary critic William Empson’s 1930 book Seven Types of Ambiguity. In other words, a state of perception is induced that’s both rigorously minimal and highly charged with associative meanings supplied by the viewer in collaboration with the object.

The three horizontal burned and painted aspen components of Resting Spirits, from 2006, have knobby, tool-like, and rocket-cone-shaped finial ends that again momentarily raise the issue of function only to transcend it, the way African fetish objects do by their mysterious, even magisterial presence. There is a gravitas to all of Geldersma’s work that has much to do with the artist’s deep engagement with wood’s essential qualities. Even when burned, varnished or painted, the warps and textures of the wood speak clearly of their origin as a cherry, pine, aspen, or maple tree.

Growing up in Louisiana, Geldersma was influenced by indigenous and imported Caribbean cultural elements, such as local traditions of Voudou, Roman Catholicism, and that carnivalesque expression of mixed heritage, ritual, decoration, and display known as the Mardi Gras festival. He now lives and works in New Mexico, and the elemental aspect of all his work fits with and reflects the southwest aesthetic. A series of Crossroads pieces evokes both the landscape and the Christian cross while acknowledging the underlying older quadrant symbolism of indigenous cultures where the vertical and horizontal axes cross at midpoint, with neither the sky nor the earth, neither the physical nor the spiritual, being privileged. Rather, the two are engaged in vibrant equilibrium.

—Marina La Palma

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

November Feature

November 4 – December 3, 2011

The month of November brings Chiaroscuro the opportunity to feature two emerging abstract painters, Mike Stack and Tim Jag. Both artists’ body of work fall into the geometric abstraction genre and use uniform straight lines and slight variations in color to achieve radically different results.

Mike Stack is a recent addition to Chiaroscuro’s represented artists. Based in Tucson AZ, Stack has been painting for over 20 years, exhibits widely in Arizona, and has been a professor of art at Pima Community College in Tucson since 2002.

Stack’s paintings are built upon a rigid structure of equidistant horizontal lines painted in slightly varying hues of color. The palette is carefully considered, providing an endless variation on hue.

Stack explains, “Variation for me is not a thematic device but an inner construct by which I can abstractly register the vivid natural spectacles of the surrounding Southwest without quoting verbatim the desert floor, a rock face, or a particular sky.”

Tim Jag’s featured paintings are recent works from his Colornova series. Like Stack, the work relies on thin strips of carefully considered colors, but Jag’s lines join together at a definitive point, forming the nucleus of an ever expanding color nova. Both large and small scale pieces will be on view. Jag elaborates, “The paintings are my way of abstractly using color and symmetry to symbolize celestial movement and experience…Formally, these paintings strive for balance between flat space versus depth, and color sensations that come out of color juxtapositions.”

Jag has exhibited widely across the Southwest and currently resides in California.

Friday, August 19, 10am – 7pm

Saturday, August 20, 10am -5pm

Sunday, August 21, 10am – 5pm

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