Discourse Matters

Eric and Rachel have new works at Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City, MO

Eric Sall @ Brain Factory, Seoul, Korea

< Homage to Morandi: Essence of Art > Participating Artists : Anne Harild, Boyun Jang , Bryan Osburn, Changkyum Kim , Changsun Koh, Chunhee Im, Eric Sall, Eunsun Park, Frank Webster, Jahyuk Yim, Joseph Burwell, Manna Lee , Sky Kim, Tom Lee 2011.6.2-6.26 < Homage to Morandi: Essence of Art > Sook-jeen Oh (Director of Brain Factory) The Ideal of this exhibition came from the lingering thoughts  of flower paintings presented at a retrospective of Giorgio Morandi (1890~1964, Italian) who has been considered as a master of 20th century still-life painter, at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art back in 2008. For this exhibition, fourteen local and international artists have individually interpreted ‘the Essence of Art' as a common theme revolving around Morandi's works and life. The beauty of a retrospective comes by encountering the strong aura of existence from the artist's entire life through his artifacts in a confined space. The retrospective of Giorgio Morandi at Metropolitan Art Museum was certainly one of the most memorable exhibitions because of two distinctive reasons. First, the letters he sent to his friends were displayed in frames side by side with his art works, and they prove the artist's private life and his spirit completely stayed in his art. Morandi transformed the daily life from ordinary to metaphysical level through subtle and delicate composition of objects as well as simple but sophisticated arrangement of palette on small canvas. While walking through the aisle where his works were displayed, I started to realize the reason why Morandi could be able to persist with his subject matter. What he was focused on was not the subject matter that was on the canvas, rather it was far more beyond the canvas. Therefore he doesn't seem to need making the visual variation. As a result, what we see from his art, at first, look all the same, but the subtleness of his works vibrates as the time passed by. I thought what he picked as the subject matter; the complexion of what he was searching through making the paintings. What I got was strong impression of his life which completely dedicated to his art as a specimen of all the artists who are searching as he was. This makes the phenomenon of synchronizing the art and the artist himself is something that we all have to think about. The second reason comes from many of Morandi's flower paintings titled ‘Fiori' (all the flower paintings titled the same.) Since they are mostly owned by private collectors- most of them remain anonymous while lending their paintings to the MET- it was very rare to see them in one place. The fact that those flower paintings were only created to give out as presents, according to the descriptions and letters he wrote, the eccentric feeling from the beauty of ‘Fiori' lingered long in my memory. The reasons listed above led me to propose ‘flowers' as the main visual theme of the exhibition. The flowers in Morandi's paintings are artificial flowers that are still preserved and displayed at Morandi Art Museum in Bologna, along with other objects that he used in his still life paintings. Therefore, his flowers in the paintings are also the one of his still life objects that he used for the paintings. This satisfies the hypothesis that the visual theme is flowers and not necessarily flowers at the same time, and it enables to nullify the symbolism of giving and receiving an object or an image of flowers. Then why are Morandi's flowers in the paintings more subtle and elegant than the real flowers? Do the images that are perceived by our eyes reflect the afterimage of our experience? Or, do we implicitly distinguish them as the flowers that would never wilt? Morandi, who once said “ There is nothing more surreal and abstract than reality itself ,” might have thought so. Maybe he wanted to accomplish something that transcends human cognition through our visual system by painting the same subject over and over. This would be the reason why his works, whose essence remains without flesh, are still loved by and inspire many artists all over the world. I'd like to share the experience of a precious opportunity to appreciate Morandi's art world, that deletes the concept of time and imbues the air of contemplation in our spirits, as well as to ponder on the “essence or art”.

Chutes & Tears - Rachel Hayes and Jiha Moon collaboration

Photos of Installation 

Videos 

Sculptor Rachel Hayes and painter Jiha Moon have been collaborating since 2007 when they met at Art Omi International Artists Residency.

Kansas City artist Rachel Hayes’s main interest is in constructing and altering space with layered colors, texture from various fabric and synthetic vinyl by sewing them together. Hayes often builds the large composed sewn panels as an installation that can be viewed in both indoor and outdoor environments. Viewers can experience color, space, material, light and shadow in a transformed setting.

Jiha Moon is an Atlanta-based painter whose gestural paintings explore fluid identities and the global movement of people and their cultures. Moon is taking cues from everyday life, mixing and twisting to make new iconographies that are in between familiar and unfamiliar zones. Moon’s bold, layered and detailed landscapes on Korean mulberry paper appear light hearted and spontaneous.

There are many dualities within the collaboration of Moon and Hayes. There is balance found in the graphic structures, sewn grids, gestural mark-making and fluid forms. Hayes and Moon together combine and embrace their opposite elements in their collaborative installations. Moon’s bold and delicate brushstrokes are painted and embedded within Rachel's sculptural panels sewn out of fabrics and Korean mulberry paper.

They go back and forth with each other’s work to make alterations and suggest possible images. There is much negotiation and deconstruction of the fabric paintings in their separate studios in Kansas City and Atlanta. The second part of collaboration is at the actual site, as they build and install these panels in the new space. Their first collaborated effort, “Outflow” was seen at The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta Georgia (December 2008 – January 2009) as part of a group exhibition, “More Mergers & Acquisitions” curated by Stuart Horodner.

Outflow – Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2009), Atlanta, GA

http://www.jihamoon.com/P_Link-collaboration.htm

Hayes and Moon have been awarded their second exhibition opportunity at The Lab Gallery in New York. The work entitled “Chutes and Tears” is a landscape which will unfold and reveal itself as one walks past the windows of the Lab Gallery in April 2011. They are working on adding the new element of used denim blue jeans to this installation, to create and evoke waterfalls in the space. They are in the middle of collecting and shredding many shades and different hues of used jeans which will connect to the painting’s fabric panel. They want to bring unexpected, surprising material to their collaborative work.

What's Up?

Blar Dee Blar - 50" x 66"

EREVIEW

Today my friend Martin Bromirski shared this link of a review of "All Most All Ways" at the Nerman MOCA. I hadn't seen it yet, so thanks Martin!

Eric receives federal commission

very exciting, the contracts are signed!

Art in Architecture buildings program
www.gsa.gov/portal/content/104456
General Services Administration
Richard Bolling Federal Building
Kansas City, Missouri
2010, completion expected 2014


here is a smattering of work solicited from the U.S.A.

www.gsa.gov/portal/content/104456

Feature in City Pictorial

This feature is from a hip culture magazine called City Pictorial based in Guangzhou, China. They visited our studios in Brooklyn, NY back in July, and a few other artists too, such as our buddy Bryan Zanisnik. Our friend Ruijun Shen interviewed us and will be sending us a copy soon hot off the presses when she returns from China.

Museum Interrupted - Nerman MOCA

Here are a few images of 'All Most All Ways' at the Nerman MOCA. I snapped these photos right after we finished installing, and will add more soon. That is Eric an Wyatt hanging out under the black side.

All Most All Ways

This is a photoshop rendering of a piece I am working on for the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. This is two sewn panels that join in the center, the black and white is opaque, and the colors are theater light gels that are inlayed into the fabric.  Anne Lindberg and Miles Neidinger are the other 2 artists in the exhibition. The show opens Oct. 29th!

Rachel Hayes - 2009 Saint-Gaudens Fellow Exhibition

This is Happening - Fabric and Mirrors

Clinging To Fate - Fabric and Rocks

Free Energy 2

Clinging to Fate - detail of shadows on wall behind piece

Free Energy 1 - Steel and Light Gels

Free Energy 1 

Free Energy 2 - Steel and Fabric

This is Happening and Free Energy 2

Eric in group show @ ATM

ATM Gallery
542 West 24th Street
New York NY 10011

JUNE 17-JULY 23, 2010

Anne Eastman
Virginia Martinsen
Noam Rappaport
Miguel Ângelo Rocha
Eric Sall
Peter Sutherland
Vince Roark

Eric Sall, "Curtain Call", 48" x 36", oil on panel, 2010

There Will Come Soft Light

in Context, An exhibition curated by Jeanne Gerrity for Smack Mellon at Bloomberg with works by
Dave Eppley, Rachel Hayes, Gareth Long and LoVid

May 13-November 13 2010

Bloomberg
731 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Eric Sall - Borderland Abstraction @ Bemis Center for Contemporary Art

Borderland Abstraction

January 22 - May 8, 2010

WHAT: Exhibition of new abstraction
WHO: Artists include Nils Folke Anderson, Tim Bavington, Nate Boyce, Michelle Grabner, Amy Granat, Mary Heilmann, Matthew Kluber, Takeshi Murata, Ara Peterson, Eli Ping, Eric Sall, Colin C. Smith and Wendy White.

WHERE: Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, 724 S. 12th, Omaha, NE

Borderland Abstraction includes several generations of artists working throughout the United States who are invested in the expanded possibilities and problems of abstraction. Their work, in painting, sculpture, photography and video, often attaches to other disciplines - music, architecture, film, urbanism, virtual space - with a fervor that swells the limits of abstraction.

Debate on abstraction ballooned in the last decade, engulfing issues as varied as the politics of beauty, material ingenuity, site-specificity and fragmentation. Response to these issues splintered into strongly worded arguments on the cause of visual pleasure v. market pressure; iteration v. spontaneity, the offhand gesture v. formal purity; reductivist aesthetics v. maximalist expression; and on and on. Rather than wallow in these debates, which ultimately shift focus from the work and its ideas, this exhibition explores the vibrant cracks in between, places where there are authentic pleasures in the making, looking and thinking about contemporary abstraction.

Nils Folke Anderson will be building work at the Bemis Center from January 19 to January 22. Please join Bemis Center Curator Hesse McGraw and Anderson, Matthew Kluber, Colin C. Smith and Wendy White for a discussion about the exhibition and their works on Saturday, January 23 from noon to 2:00 p.m.

This exhibition is organized by Hesse McGraw, Bemis Center curator.

Jiha Moon & Rachel Hayes, together again!

More Mergers & Acquisitions
DEC 10, 2009 - FEB 14, 2010
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center

535 Means Street NW
Atlanta, GA, 30318
404.688.1970
info@thecontemporary.org

Heidi Aishman, Steve Aishman, Leah Busch, Joe Gibbons, Sam Gilliam, Golden Blizzard, Ron Gorchov, Curtis Mitchell, Jiha Moon and Rachel Hayes, Joe Peragine, Arnulf Rainer, Scott Reeder, Frank Stella, Team SHaG, Brad Tucker, William Wegman, Richard Wentworth, Joel-Peter Witkin

More Mergers & Acquisitions is a continuation of our popular and provocative exhibition Mergers & Acquisitions (December 12, 2008 – January 25, 2009), that brought together works by renowned modern masters and consequential contemporary artists. Once again, distinctive works in various media have been borrowed from local, regional, and national artists, collections, galleries, and studios; combined they create surprising affinities of form, content, and historical legacy. The exhibition is organized into four themes: Figure-Ground, Collaboration, Un-Natural, and Familiar Faces. Throughout the exhibition, found photographs contribute to each thematic grouping.

Figure-Ground is an organizational concept that helps to locate specific forms in represented or real space. Works by painters Sam Gilliam, Ron Gorchov, and Frank Stella clarify or confuse elements of figure and ground by redefining the possibilities of the shaped canvas and how it can contain color and gesture. Brad Tucker and Richard Wentworth are sculptors who manipulate common materials (wooden lattice, metal buckets) to create humorously metaphysical objects and installations.

Jiha Moon and Rachel Hayes, Golden Blizzard (an Atlanta-based collective), and Team SHaG (New York painters Amy Sillman, David Humphrey, and Elliott Green), all choose to take on the joys and pitfalls of Collaboration. Each artist possesses a diverse and inclusive practice, so their collective activities cultivate an even wider range of illustrative techniques and image-making traditions including collage, figuration, landscape, surrealism, fantasy, and kitsch.

The theme of Un-Natural brings together works by Steve Aishman, Joe Gibbons, Joe Peragine, and Scott Reeder, who examine aspects of abundance, violence, estrangement, and sadness. Their works present various flowers, plants, and gardens as the recipients of human activity or as sentient beings capable of their own expressive powers.

Familiar Faces are seen in a variety of funny or disturbing head shots including Osama Bin Laden, Farrah Fawcett, the Man in the Moon, and artist self portraits. Works by Heidi Aishman, Leah Busch, Arnulf Rainer, Curtis Mitchell, Joel-Peter Witkin, and William Wegman use these subjects in combination with precise materials to examine the complexities of identity and popular culture.

More Mergers & Acquisitions acknowledges current states of personal, economic, and institutional uncertainty while positing an optimistic tone of generosity and camaraderie.

Eric Sall @ Marty Walker Gallery, Nov. 21st - Dec. 23rd

Eric will be showing a group of paintings titled 'Obstacles'.

Marty Walker Gallery
2135 Farrington Street
Dallas, TX 75207

Obstacle 1, 2008, oil on canvas, 46" x 60"

Obstacle 2, 2008, oil on canvas, 40" x 36"

Obstacle 3, 2008, oil on canvas, 36" x 40"

Rachel's sneak peak for upcoming shows...

Here is the 1st model for the middle gallery @ my upcoming solo show at Colorado State University December 2009...







Also in December, my friend Jiha Moon and I will be collaborating on a piece at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center


STAY TUNED!