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27/3/2003

Shona Macdonald

Julie Baker Fine Art, Grass Valley

Terrain

'In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty. In the worlds of roads and paths, beauty is constantly changing; it tells us every step...' Milan Kundera, Immortality

In Terrain, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Shona Macdonald, Macdonald continues her fascination with topographical maps and remnants of diagrams. In the essay accompanying the exhibit, Chicago art critic John Brunetti writes, 'Initially influenced by her intuitive responses to the irregular topographic rhythms of her native Scotland and the surrounding British Isles, her shimmering, layered images evoke equal parts sea and land that are locked in a symbiotic, fluid tug-of-war, revealing the fiction behind most accepted boundaries---natural as well as man-made. She cuts apart and reassembles shorelines into reconstituted horizons, allows rivers to become roads and seeks a continuum between the lines of tree branches and the crest of waves. The resulting images evoke apparitions more than the material world.'

On first appearance, Macdonald's works look like unconventional landscapes and strange mutations of natural elements. Upon closer inspection, roads and landmasses are revealed to form original topographies and maps of imaginary places. She is interested in both the literal and autobiographical nature of reading maps in the markings and keys to memory and place. Although loaded with information and layers of paint, gouache, collage and pencil, the resulting works evoke something familiar and comforting. By creating her own maps with hand made marks Macdonald is able to interpret such disparate places as the rugged coast of Scotland and the highways in Illinois which she travels weekly, and the activities that bind the locales together in her memory.

Shona Macdonald is Assistant Professor of Art at Illinois State University in Bloomington, Illinois, where she teaches painting, drawing and advises undergraduate and graduate students. She is represented in Chicago by Fassbender Gallery and in California by Julie Baker Fine Art. She has also shown in Berlin, New York, Canada and England. She has been artist-in-residence at the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, (on a Friend's fellow), both 2001 and Hospitalfield House in Arbroath, Scotland, 1991. She was recently nominated for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and has been awarded a research grant from the Illinois State University of Fine Arts, and a CAAP Grant from the Department of Cultural Affairs, Chicago.

Artist's Reception free and open to the public: Friday, March 28, 6 - 8 PM.

Artist's Talk: Saturday, March 29, 6 to 7:30pm

Open Tuesday - Saturday, 11am - 5pm and by appointment.

Special installation by Bay Area conceptual artist David Ireland
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On view in the project room Charles Goldman: DWGS. Goldman works within two practices, site specific installations and studio works comprised of paintings, drawings and videos as single site-specific projects concerning time, space and the experience that, inevitably, takes place within it. In DWGS, 4 stacks of 8 drawings will sit on two tables. The drawings are from the Dirty Drawing Series, an infinite group of spontaneous marks, muddled notations and inspired doodles made on miscellaneous flat surfaces, mainly paper. The stacks according to Goldman represent various cross sections of his 'faulty' brain. Says Goldman, 'They are also based on the simple notion that one bad idea is simply that - a bad idea. But eight bad ideas may just equal one good one.'

To preview the exhibit please visit the website or contact the gallery for a complete press package and images. Gallery hours are Tuesday - Saturday, 11am to 5pm and by appointment.

Julie Baker Fine Art, a gallery that opened in November of 2001, is a venue for contemporary art that offers cutting edge exhibitions, collector's services & cultural activities. The gallery's mission is to educate and celebrate the creative influences that ignite contemporary art. Julie Baker Fine Art is drawing on art resources from around the country and bringing them to Grass Valley in California's Gold Country. Artweek praised the addition to the California cultural scene with the comment 'Although no one quite remembers who made the pronouncement that painting is dead recent shows at MoCA, SFMOMA and Julie Baker Fine Art have made it abundantly clear that painting is definitely alive and well.' The setting is bucolic, the aesthetic is sophisticated and contemporary.

Image: Detail of 'Rivers and Roads' by Shona Macdonald.
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Upcoming Exhibitions May/June:

May 2- - July 5, 2003: Kurt Steger: Weight of Time
New sculpture
Reception for the artist: Friday, May 2, 6-8pm.

Julie Baker Fine Art
120 N. Auburn St Suite 100, Grass Valley, CA 95945

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