Santa Fe, NM – Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art presents Group Show: New Winter Mix from February 26 – March 27, 2010. This multi-media show features works by Rick Bartow, Harry Fonseca, John Garrett, Jay Tracy, Emmi Whitehorse and other gallery artists. This show encompasses Chiaroscuro’s main space on Gypsy Alley, as well as our new extension into the front Canyon Rd space at 708 Canyon. Full press release on the new extension space will be forthcoming in March. On exhibit are two of Rick Bartow’s wooden assemblages. This work was inspired by African pieces he saw while visiting an exhibition featuring Pacific art. He went home and started pulling up old fence posts and cutting them up making use of the rough and ready nature of the materials. These works are a lighter contrast to the more intense and dramatic drawings and capture a playful quality in the animals they depict. The late Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu), whose estate is represented by Chiaroscuro, is widely known for his narrative series of Coyote images that place the well-known trickster figure of Native myth (along with his girlfriend, Rose!) in contemporary settings. While four works from the Coyote series are on view, 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. John Garrett’s woven wall hangings and basket forms crafted out of found and natural materials both critique and celebrate late 20th-century material excess. For the past thirty-five years Garrett has worked with textile technologies to create two-and three-dimensional pieces that are visually unpredictable and intellectually eloquent. Garrett received his Masters degree in Design from the University of California–Los Angeles and has taught at Scripps College and UCLA. He now teaches workshops nationwide on creativity and the use of textile methods to create sculpture. Chemical reactions; heat and light on paper; the visible marks the invisible; the bound and the unbound. Jay Tracy has been exploring the physical properties of various materials and how he can harness their chemical reactions for personal mark making on paper or canvas for decades. Featured are Tracy’s long running thermogenic drawing series of ‘heat’ markings on vintage fax paper. Mysterious and intricate, these compositions explore repetition of line and process with unique results.
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.”
Group Show: NewWinter Mix February 26 – March 27, 2010Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 10 am – 5 pm. High resolution photographs available.Call 505-992-0711 or email gallery@chiaroscurosantafe.com.
