FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Gunnar Plake: The Light Within

Peter Millet: Woman at the Well

September 17 – October 16, 2010

Santa Fe, NM- Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art presents: Gunnar Plake: The Light Within and Peter Millet: Woman at the Well from September 17 – October 16, 2010. The opening reception for both exhibitions is Friday, September 17, from 5 – 7pm.

Gunnar Plake

Whether it’s a shot of condors soaring through the desert sky or of the Colorado River far below, Gunnar Plake captures the essence of seeing while in motion. A sweeping motion performed during the exposure provides a clarity of its own: while details vanish, patterns emerge, the land comes alive in these large scale abstractions.

Featured at Chiaroscuro next month is Plake’s second series of Grand Canyon images that capture the feel of the landscape as a light-filled, ever changing world. The textural feel of Plake’s photographs accentuate the interconnectedness of landscape forms. Through distortions of light and atmosphere, patterns emerge in the colored bands of rock layers, as distance is expressed in various hues of blue. The intentional lack of sharp focus on landscape features gives viewers the freedom to absorb the feel of place, without the sharp details so prevalent in traditional landscape photograph.

The UV protected and laminated photographs are mounted on anodized aluminum with a reflective edge that changes depending on your angle of view. Plake has exhibited his photograph extensively throughout the United States and his subjects range from impressionistic seascapes to wide-open desert vistas, woods and forests.

Peter Millet

Seattle based sculptor Peter Millett creates geometric compositions, in metal or painted wood, which engage the viewer in a dialogue about shape and space. In Millett’s first solo show at Chiaroscuro, he draws inspiration from an old blues song by staging a scene of abstract sculpture. Woman at the Well is a collection of geometric sculptures containing the essence of human forms through distinct angles and volumes.

Using folded sheet metal or wood to explore a geometry-based visual language, Millett incorporates a refined, modern sensibility to his work. Millet’s sculptural configurations are both bold and graceful, and his work often plays upon the presence of the object and the emptiness of the space which surrounds it. Millett’s sculptures inhabit (activate?) the space they are in, and invite the viewer to meditate on form. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design in 1971, Millett has shown extensively in Washington.

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Gunnar Plake: The Light Within

Peter Millet: Woman at the Well

September 17 – October 16, 2010

Opening reception, Friday, September 17, from 5 – 7pm

For more information call 505-992-0711 or email gallery@chiaroscurosantafe.com

In addition, the following day, Friday, August 2o, Chiaroscuro presents Collected Voices: Contemporary Native Art, which features several new works by Simpson as well as seven other contemporary Native artists.  During the opening reception Rose B. Simpson and Yatika Starr Fields will be creating their own installation pieces in an ongoing performance.

Also, join us for the opening reception of Collected Voice: Contemporary Native Art from 5-7pm on Friday, August 20.  Chiaroscuro has extended hours from 10am to 5pm on Sunday, August 22nd.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Collected Voices: Contemporary Native Art

August 20 – September 10, 2010

Sante Fe, NM- Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art presents: Collected Voices: Contemporary Native Art from August 20 – September 10, 2010. The opening reception for this exhibition is Friday, August 20, from 5 – 7pm.

This year, Chiaroscuro’s annual Indian Market show, Collected Voices: Contemporary Native Art, features the work of eight contemporary Native artists. Collected Voices showcases the talents and visions of this extraordinary group of artists as a dialogue between the generations and between the diverse mediums of painting, ceramic, glass, and works on paper. Each artist brings his or her unique aesthetic to the powerful themes of identity, place, and changing traditions.

Collected Voices features seven gallery artists and one new artist, Joe Feddersen, represented by Froelick Gallery in Portland, Oregon. In addition to the late Harry Fonseca, the returning artists include, Rick Bartow, Yatika Starr Fields, Lisa Holt and Harlan Reano, Rose B. Simpson, and Kay Walkingstick.

Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo) is among the most talented young artists working today. From her visceral self-portraits that grapple with themes of personal transformation and identity, to ideas that broach more global concerns, her work is expressive, emotional, and diverse. Simpson, a former vocalist for the band Chocolate Helicopter, is now a master’s candidate at Rhode Island School of Design. For Collected Voices, Simpson presents a new body of work, done outside of the RISD curriculum. Pod II, one of these works, depicts a ceramic female figure inside a woven basket form. The ambiguity of the piece calls into question the dual nature of tradition as something that confines but also comforts, something that smothers individual creativity but also protects. Ultimately, the woven shell surrounding the ceramic figure is as fragile as the figure itself. Similar ideas are explored through ceramic bowls and pottery that combine traditional and contemporary motifs. Simpson’s work expresses an intimate, personal history of the artist in such basic human terms that her work has a broad, all-encompassing reach.

Other younger artists include Lisa Holt (Cochiti Pueblo) and Harlan Reano (Santa Domingo Pueblo) who collaborate on traditional vessel forms in painted ceramic. Holt, niece of famous ceramic sculptor and fashion designer Virgil Ortiz, creates the vessel forms. Reano paints her ceramics with decorative motifs that elaborate on traditional designs with audacious innovations. The eye-catching pieces included in Collected Voices extend their innovative approach to include the form of the pottery itself. Here, the theme is animal forms, a Cochiti tradition. Reano’s work sometimes incorporates Santo Domingo Pueblo motifs but frequently employs his own original designs. The showpiece for this exhibition is a serpent figure, painted in the artist’s bold style, a fusion of hybrid forms that is snake-like, insect-like, and oddly human.

Yatika Starr Fields (Cherokee, Creek, and Osage), another younger Native artist, is a painter who employs dazzling, hallucinogenic imagery with personal themes. Last year, Chiaroscuro presented a series of his paintings based on the significance of buoys to Native and non-Native cultures. Starr Fields canvasses are vibrant, all-over abstractions that are infused with color, symbols, and movement in swirling maelstroms of dreamlike imagery. Among the lush, bold use of paint and color, Starr Fields incorporates common everyday objects. These, like the buoys, may have a cultural significance or represent icons of memory making his paintings far more personal. Now based in New York, Starr Fields, originally from Oklahoma, became involved with the graffiti culture of east coast urban centers and the influence of a graffiti aesthetic can be seen in his work.

New to Chiaroscuro this year is veteran artist Joe Feddersen (Colville). Feddersen employs blown and mirrored glass, fused glass and copper, as well as a variety of printmaking techniques to bring a minimalist aesthetic to his diverse body of work. Fedderson, whose work was included in a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in 2003, translates traditional symbolic forms into a contemporary idiom. His most recent exhibition, called Codex, was a series of glass basket forms that referenced the regional, historic basketry of the Colville tribes. Feddersen brings other examples of his Native basket inspired glass, decorated with geometric patterns that recall the symbolic language of the Colville, to Collected Voices.

Fedderson, along with gallery artist Rick Bartow (Wiyot), represent an older generation of artists. Themes of transformation or metamorphosis are rife within Bartow’s work. Defying more conventional, even trite, depictions of peace and harmony between Native Americans and the animal world, Bartow’s works on paper are violent, schizophrenic and nightmarish. Adding to the unease of his quasi-human/animal portraits are the pastel colors he uses to render them: pinks, light greens, and purples. The contrasting darks and lights suggest violent transformation, a struggle against change. Bartow taps into a raw, emotional vein of ferocious hunger, and of raging, animal instinct.

Kay WalkingStick’s (Cherokee) paintings often pairs landscapes with objects, symbols, or dancing figures to present as contrasting or complimentary images. Sometimes, morphological similarities between landscapes and other forms, such as human figures, form the basis for a pairing that suggests a convergence between the forms. This dual aspect of her work is exemplified by a painting called Seven Sisters, depicting an unbroken range of seven mesa-like formations half in daylight and half under a nighttime sky. WalkingStick, by presenting a simultaneous aspect of a single view, lends a mystical reverence to the idea of place. WalkingStick, a former professor of art at Cornell University, adds a touch of ambiguity to Seven Sisters as the title could have multiple meanings including referencing the Pleiades which can be seen right of center on the painting’s nighttime side.

Chiaroscuro, which represents the Harry Fonseca (Maidu) estate, is proud to once again show some of the late artist’s paintings. A highlight of the Fonseca’s work in Collected Voices is a painting from a series on Saint Francis of Assisi he did in the 1990s. More from this series can be seen in In the Silence of Dusk, a current exhibit of Fonseca’s work at the Museum of Indian Art and Culture.

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Collected Voices: Contemporary Native Art

August 20 – September 10, 2010

Opening reception, Friday, August 20, from 5 – 7pm

Go to http://www.facebook.com/ChiaroscuroSantaFe

And as always, keep checking this website for up-to-the minute inventory and information on exhibitions.

Opening receptions: Friday, July 9, 5-7p

ATLANTIC ASPECTS
   PAUL WEIDEMAN
Published: June 11, 2010

The show coincides with the release of Renate Aller: Oceanscapes from Santa Fe publisher Radius Books. Reproductions of her photographs are accompanied by essays from Richard B. Woodward, New York journalist and art critic; Jasmin Seck, German photo-art historian; and Petra Roettig, head of contemporary art at the Hamburger Kunsthalle museum in Germany.

Aller was born in Germany and studied for four years at the Chelsea School of Art and the Byam Shaw School of Art, both in London. In the early- and mid-2000s, she was an artist in residence at the Monaghan County Museum in Ireland and then at the Villa Romana in Florence.

“I started the ocean photographs when I moved from London to the United States, to a house at Westhampton Beach on Long Island,” she told Pasatiempo. “I started taking pictures, and it wasn’t an art project, really; it was just something I did, and I probably found my bearings doing that.

I think that was very important, because, you know, coming to New York as an artist is quite scary.”

The early images for Oceanscapes were captured using a film camera. She scanned the negatives in order to make digital prints on her preferred paper, made by the English company Arches. Later on, she switched to Hahnem Ahle paper, made in Germany, printing directly from photo files created with a digital camera.

Prompted by the suggestion that she made the camera change because digital cameras are easier to use than traditional film cameras, Aller at first agreed and then corrected herself. “I wouldn’t say it’s easier, because digital cameras like controlled light. They’re perfect for studio situations, but they’re not really that happy with highlights and lowlights, which is what I’m dealing with. It’s just a change. I’m still doing an analog [film] project, photographing 10 women over 10 years. I have found it quite exciting to use a digital camera, but it’s quite tricky when you can’t control the light source.”

The light source in her seascapes, of course, is the sun. It may be a constant, but the quality of light is intensely changeable, as evidenced by Aller’s prints. The water may be shimmering, placid, or tempestuous and filled with whitecaps; the sky ranges from almost white to nearly black and from blank to pregnant with colorful cumulus clouds.

Her photographs are gorgeous, but they also function as scientific documents about the ocean and light in a relatively controlled situation. (The only variable in the photographer’s action of creating each image is the position of the horizon line; she can move the camera up or down.)

“When I take the picture, I just take that one picture as it should be for itself,” Aller said. “The other thing is that it’s the anticipation of the moment yet to come. By the time I take the picture, because there is always a delay, I kind of feel I capture the moment of the anticipation and the actual moment, which is quite a different energy than taking a picture of something you’ve already reflected upon.

“I have a lot of time to think, being on the ocean,” she said with a laugh, “and this is maybe also about the way we always want to hold on to the moment, that beautiful moment, the familiar moment. But at the same time, our yearning for the next moment is as strong. It may be scary or wonderful; it doesn’t matter. But we definitely have a yearning. So there’s that contradiction.”

She intends to continue the Oceanscapes work, which has occupied her for more than a decade. “I never designed it to be a 10-year project. We just did that for the book,” she said. “It has actually been going for 11 years now. I only stopped doing it after 9/11 for a while, because it seemed to be so irrelevant. I think I was embarrassed to do the seascapes right then. I did a project about the people in the neighborhood, which was more like a workshop situation. I took their pictures and listened to their stories, more as a social worker would have done, which they didn’t.”

Each print at Chiaroscuro bears a descriptive title: simply the month and year the photo was taken. “I was hoping to have no titles at all, but galleries have a really hard time with that,” she said. “I’m doing the month and the year, but it’s really a compromise, because I think a title keeps people from engaging in the work in the way they should.

“Titles are very powerful. I did a video called Whose place is this anyway?, but the title was part of the work, because it’s about who’s entitled to a place — you know, if you’re an immigrant, what entitles you to be somewhere, that whole problem.”

Much of Aller’s other work is figure-based: the 2003 photo installation You’ve red between the lines, her 2006 Italian Portraits, and photos in the 2008 Mayim Rabim project, for example. Asked about that in relation to Oceanscapes, Aller said, “I think we project ourselves on the ocean. It feels like our presence is maybe even more so there when we’re not in it.”

When she considers the Atlantic Ocean, she said, her choices about the ideal moment to click the shutter and about placement of the horizon line are more intuitive than intellectual. “I think it’s a subconscious thing. When I look through the camera, I feel what’s the right proportion between sky and ocean. I think it’s not that I decide that, but it’s the experience. I do believe if you’re very centered in the now and here, then your decisions and your projections are much clearer.

“At the moment [early evening, June 1], I’m looking at the ocean, and it’s very gushy and hazy, and the horizon seems to be nearly towering over me, whereas this morning it felt very far away and very low. Sometimes the ocean appears low or high and sometimes very close by or very far away. That’s not just the ebb and flow, but I think it’s how the particles in the air reflect. It’s an optical illusion.”

Renate Aller: Oceanscapes: One View, Ten Years

Exhibit through July 3

Artist book signing June 19, 2-4pm 

Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art, 702 Canyon Road