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9/5/2007

Dear Mr. Saltz

Pharmaka Art, Los Angeles

Group show

Curated by: York Chang and Karyl Newman

What happens when a Pulitzer-nominated art critic writes a strongly-worded critique of painting and sparks an energetic and widespread debate amongst artists about the state of painting in an age of mass media consumption?

This upcoming exhibition, hosted by Pharmaka Gallery on Downtown Gallery Row, was organized as a response by eight painters to one well-known art critic's critique on the use of photography in painting. Pulitzer-nominated art critic Jerry Saltz's Village Voice article, “The Richter Resolution,” struck a nerve with its call for a 48-month moratorium on photo-based painting. The article, later reprinted in Modern Painter magazine, sparked heated discussions among artist communities about the meaning of painting and representation in an age of mass media visual saturation.

Independent curators York Chang and Karyl Newman bring together eye-popping work by eight painters from some of Los Angeles' hottest galleries, all of whom use some form of photography and mass media imagery as source material in their painting practices. The exhibition of paintings, along with written materials submitted by each of these artists, is not so much about particular styles of painting as the relationship between artist, the public, and the art critic.

Paintings by: Douglas Bloom, Julie Brown-Smith, Allison Cortson, Ed Johnson, Chad Robertson, Greg Santos, Tyler Stallings, Holly Williams-Brock

Douglas Bloom's paintings bridge the space between representation and abstraction. His work plays up the strengths of both modes of painting in a single surface. He creates striking passages of blurry photorealism, but then interrupts and subverts key compositional elements in the image into flat vivid color-fields, converting them into devices of formal abstract design. The optical effect is vibrant, elegant, and simultaneously bolsters and challenges the value of both modes of painting. His work was published in two different editions of New American Painters, and has been selected for group exhibitions by curators from MOCA, Hammer Museum, Pasadena Museum of California Art, and Gallery C.

Julie Brown-Smith's paintings are ink-on-canvas paintings which draw on the documentary qualities of black and white photography, but also reference her own experiences as a printmaker. The stark, high-contrast photo-booth images, usually associated with spontaneity and in-the-moment exuberance, take on a new, more solemn and monumental quality by virtue of their scale and by their meticulous hand-made execution. Her work has been featured on numerous independent films and television series, including Six Feet Under, Weeds, and in over two hundred private, public and corporate collections internationally.

Allison Cortson's large-scale paintings combine fine art, philosophy and science with the use of traditional and not-so-traditional mediums. She renders her subjects in a straightforward, photo-realistic manner, relying on everyday snapshots of friends and family in their natural domestic environments. But the environments the subjects inhabit have the look of ghostly afterimages, made even more transitory with the realization that they are rendered in the actual dust collected from the various subjects' environments, reflecting Cortson's fascination in the idea that all matter is mostly space, and a project to represent something can be made more potent with the actual residue of existence. Allison Cortson, a CalArts MFA graduate, is represented by The Happy Lion Gallery on Chung King Road, Chinatown Los Angeles, and has exhibited in major galleries in Germany and Europe. Her work was recently featured in Harper's Magazine.

Ed Johnson attempts to reveal the profundity of the transitive moment, frozen by the pause button on a television screen, trapped between one moment and another, and subsequently memorialized in oil on plexiglass. His paintings, based on photographs of a 1970's modern western, capture every nuanced visual glitch and shimmering pixel, and tell us that highly mediated images (a painting of a photograph of a video of a film) can tell us something about the beautiful complex contradictions inherent in representation and painting. Ed Johnson is an MFA graduate of Art Center in Pasadena, has appeared in Modern Painter magazine, and just finished a solo exhibition at Kristi Engle Gallery.

Chad Robertson uses modern technological tools to plunge viewers deep into the “moment between the moment,” the images of human gestures captured between frames in a video. To Robertson, these gestures as truer, more authentic representations of human motivations and intentions than that depicted by the self-conscious expressions of traditional portraiture. To create his source material, he shoots digital video of subjects, and freezes frames which capture these unconscious gestures. He then layers images in oil to take these images out of the antiseptic digital realm, and into a painting context where a deeper appreciation of the significance of these in-between moments can be found. The resulting optical effect of multiple images overlaid on a single plane is a shimmering, vibrating and pulsing energy not often found in the traditional medium of painting. Robertson an Otis graduate represented by Sixspace Gallery in Culver City, exhibits at artfairs internationally, and has been featured in major publications, including Anthem, Artkrush, Flavorpill, Juxtapoz, Flaunt, LA Weekly's Pick of the Week, and the LA Times.

Greg Santos employs video and photography as source material to create stunning, light-filled paintings depicting utterly improbably images of staged peril and extravagant disaster. Working from his own photographs of the television screen, and working to recreate the idiosyncratic properties of light from the screen with layers of thin oil glazes, Santos focuses on representing the ephemera (and the detritus) of the mass media phenomena we are all intimately and psychologically connected to. Greg has been featured in Flavorpill, Art Ltd., and recently completed solo exhibitions at See Line Gallery in Santa Monica and Lawrence Asher Gallery on Miracle Mile.

Tyler Stallings utilizes traditional realism techniques to play a visual game between photography, sculpture, and painting. Creating three-dimensional collages and paper sculpture photographs as the primary material, Stallings takes the additional step of executing and reconceiving these objects as paintings. Each step of distorting and mediating the images in the photograph is a step which invites the viewer to think on the meaning and mystery of representation, and the purpose of the artistic project. Tyler Stalling has exhibited at Cirrus Gallery, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Richard Telles Gallery, Newspace Gallery, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California. Stallings was formerly the Curator of Exhibitions at the Laguna Museum of Art, and is currently the Director of the Sweeney Art Gallery at UC Riverside.

Holly Williams-Brock's warm, lush, eye-watering paintings of blurred city scenes and studio audiences explore a type of photorealism based on the idea of the photograph as a medium of manipulation rather than as documentary. Williams-Brock's painting, rather than photography (with its plasticity in the modern Photoshop age) has become the medium of authenticity for her, manifested in its status as a unique, laboriously handmade object with a tangible connection to its maker, and sitting in opposition to the fleeting nature of technology and mass production. Her paintings also explore how Los Angeles' relationship to public space and the romantic, color-enhanced mythologies constructed by the city's film and television lenses affect personal experiences. Holly Williams-Brock is an Otis BFA painting graduate and is represented by Gallery C in Hermosa Beach.

Pharmaka Art
101 West 5th St. - Los Angeles

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