Santa Fe, NM – Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art presents Winter Mix from January 29 – February 20, 2010. The group show features works by photographers Renate Aller, Irene Kung and Gunnar Plake. Painters Harry Fonseca and Emmi Whitehorse are also on exhibit.
Renate Aller focuses on the sea in this series of digital color-pigment prints. Shot from her home on Long Island from the exact same position over a period of ten years, she brings a painterly elegance to photography that result in beautiful combinations of light and texture, and that merge abstraction and representation. Her work is in the collections of corporate institutions, private collectors and museums, the most recent being The Yale University Art Gallery and Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany. Chiaroscuro will be featuring a major solo exhibition to coincide with her first monograph release, spring, 2010. Using famous and familiar buildings, Irene Kung’s stunning technique allows her subjects to dominate the center of the photographs emphasizing their character and the details of their ornate decorative elements. The subtle gradation from light to dark as the eye moves to the outer edges of each image is total, leaving the center in sharply defined focus. Her photographs have a quality like that of still-life painting, a genre for which she is known. She has primarily shown her work in New York, Rome and Paris.
Unlike most photography which freezes a moment in time, Gunnar Plake is interested in the space between moments. Moving the camera during exposure, colors are stretched and blended to achieve subtleties in each image. His technique results in images that highlight the sense of fluid motion and the beauty of the interaction between light and shadow, between light and the reflective and absorptive properties of matter—all done to dizzying and brilliant effect.
The late Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu) whose estate is represented by Chiaroscuro is known for his series of Coyote images that place the well-known trickster figure of Native myth (along with his girlfriend, Rose!) in contemporary settings. In this exhibition we focus on the Stone Poem series that were inspired by ancient rock art throughout the American Southwest. The Stone Poems are not meant to be so much an interpretive recording of rock images but a way of self-exploration. The canvases, some as large as 6’ by 12’, suggest the size and scope of petroglyphic panels. We are exhibiting this work in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition, Harry Fonseca: In the Silence of Dusk at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, February 14 through January 2, 2011.
Internationally known painter Emmi Whitehorse’s (Navajo) abstract canvases depict layers of markings, lines and shapes interwoven in fields of blended color. Not purely abstract, her paintings suggest landscapes with firmaments, the lines between them softly blurred. They visually represent the Navajo philosophy of harmony and balance. Whitehorse says, “To make art, the act of making art must stay true to a harmonious balance of beauty, nature, humanity and the whole universe. This is in accordance with Navajo philosophy. I have chosen to focus on nature, on landscape.”
Winter Mix, January 29 – February 20, 2010Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 10 am – 5 pm. High resolution photographs available.Call 505-992-0711 or email gallery@chiaroscurosantafe.com.