“BIG LICK BOOM: A New Installation by Wayne White”

June 8 – August 25, 2012

TAUBMAN MUSEUM
110 Salem Avenue SE
Roanoke, VA 24011

‘Meticulosity’ aims to reconnect the conceptual, visual

It’s a meeting of the mind and spirit for the Southern California-based artists in Otis College of Art and Design’s multimedia exhibition.

By Leah Ollman, Special to the Los Angeles Times / April 29, 2012

For the full article on the Los Angeles Times website go HERE

May 19 – June 23, 2012
Opening reception Saturday May 19^th 6-8pm

Western Project is proud to present the first major Los Angeles exhibition of works by Brian Porray. Now a resident of Claremont, California, the artist paints and collages large-scale works influenced by his twenty-plus years on the neon streets of Las Vegas:

This work is sort of like the psychedelic memory of a psychedelic memory. All of these pieces are focused solely on the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas, an enormous black pyramid shaped mega-resort that was built during my first year of high school. Since I wasn’t old enough to party on The Strip, my experience of Las Vegas at night was as a neon backdrop for chemically enhanced desert parties. I vaguely remember standing in the dirt staring up at the beam of light shooting out of the Luxor’s peak – - after a minute my eyes adjusted and I could almost make out what looked like huge black bats swarming around the top of the pyramid. The light didn’t dissolve the way a flashlight does – it was so much brighter. It felt solid, like I could climb up through it. I hadn’t really looked at the light until that night, and I remember being terrified – - psychologically it totally fucked me up.

The Luxor and its beacon are central themes in this body of work as a point of conceptual origin;  the triangle is the basic unit of formal organization and composition. In the 1990’s the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas was seen as a premier example of post-modern architecture; the black glass pyramid intentionally recalling the history of other desert pyramids.  As pure architectural artifice on the Vegas Strip, the Luxor created an ominous, but transformational experience for the artist.

 –(\DARKHOR5E/)– is a convoluted universe of spaces/atmospheres/images; conversely, made with economic means: painted, drawn, slashed and pasted together. Most of the works have a central point, radiating outwards, breaking space into a multitude of micro worlds and patterns. The notion of traditional grid space is usurped by triangular shapes which explode and multiply in myriad possibilities, as though science and technology have crashed and burned into a formal and toxic landscape. The artist also uses drawing and printing to reproduce or replicate motifs of space, all heavily collaged on canvas. The images can not be taken in by the human eye all at once due to the multiplicity of forms. Formally tied to the 1960’s Op art of Bridget Riley, Porray’s constructions move sideways and contrary: compositions burst with seeming chaos while bound together in a kind of Buckminster Fuller / tweaker architecture.

The work plays notions of ornamentation, systems, and orderliness into unexpected corners; humorous, apocalyptic and radiant. His vision is not of an organic nature, but conceptual, mathematic realms. While some of his geometric patterning mirrors folk art quilts, they also recall the futuristic films, Brazil and Blade Runner, yet any somberness is eradicated as the artist seems to have hacked Matisse’s color wheel to animate the darkness.

Using cyberspace language: leet or leetspeak (once an obscure language of computer geeks and hackers) to title his works, Porray melds notions of the digital and material worlds; techno language as a code to point to or locate objects and more, essence. In –(\DARKHOR5E/)– , the veil has dropped, the acid too, and so the definitions we hold precious: now we see.

Brian Porray’s work was recently acquired by the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles; he is a 2012 Fellow at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, Nebraska;  and a previous recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2010. Brian’s work has appeared in New American Paintings #84, and #87. He was included in ‘Spectrum’ at the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery, Cal Poly Pomona, California, and has shown at Tomkins Projects, Brooklyn, New York, Trifecta Gallery in Las Vegas, and Sheppard Fine Arts in Reno, Nevada. Porray is an MFA graduate of the University of Las Vegas.

Brian Porray is an MFA graduate of the University of Las Vegas, and lives and works in Claremont, California.

For information and images, contact the gallery at 310-838-0609
cliff@western-project.com / erin@western-project.com

Opening reception for the artist Saturday March 31^st 6-8pm

Western Project is proud to present the first exhibition of work by Eric Freeman in five years. Exhibiting primarily in Europe since 2007, the New York artist returns with a new body of oil paintings rich in color and complexity. By combining beeswax with oil paint and iridescent pigments, Freeman leaps in to a new territory of luminous abstraction. Using bold compositions that simultaneously mirror technology and nature, and blur the notions of artificial and natural, the work references science fiction and mythological allegories; the still or flickering light from 2001: A Space Odyssey collides with the solemn northern hues of Casper David Frederick’s landscapes. But perhaps the paintings are more akin to the phenomenological light in the works of James Turrell, or rave concert-lighting – each an evocative and often disjunctive experience – both visually and bodily.

Freeman has entwined many historical and contemporary ideas into his classic vision this time using overlapping or horizontal bands of color. Echoes of Barnett Newman’s paintings or a sunrise over the Aegean come to mind. Landscape is immediately referenced and then interrupted by a vertical column of light in the paintings. It is the contrasting compositional format which slyly creates indeterminate spatial relationships in each work – what is foreground, what is surface, what color is it exactly, for the colors shift as one moves around the canvas, enhanced by his use of iridescent pigments.  The pictures never appear the same twice and the viewer’s experience of the painting is never the same twice. The subtle shifting of color in the paintings is in tenuous contrast with the sensuous surfaces of paint; these are grittier and more anxious works, slippery beauty at once urbane and ethereal.

Eric Freeman’s work was recently acquired by the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York. He has shown at the Wetterling Gallery in Stockholm, Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki, Alain Noirhomme, Brussels, Mary Boone Gallery, Stephen Stux Gallery and Feature Gallery in New York, Glen Horowitz Gallery in East Hampton, and the Saatchi Gallery in London and is included in the Saatchi collection. His work is also in the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation and the Kiasma – Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland.

For further information and images, please contact the gallery: cliff@western-project.com or 310-838-0609.

Also in the West Room: Aaron Sheppard: Five New Paintings

Opening reception for the artist:
Saturday March 31^st 6-8pm

Western Project is proud to present new paintings by Aaron Sheppard in the West Room. Now a resident of Los Angeles, Sheppard is continuing his exploration on myths of the creation of man and woman, especially from the 16^th century artist Jan Harmensz Muller. Using a variety of elements and collage, Sheppard constructs a brew of familiar yet exotic narrative imagery. He writes:

“I seek to objectify the materiality of the mediums used (paint, neon resin,,,), showcase the study of line work, and highlight issues of human identity, while hoping to have the sensual relationship with each of these items resonate……I ponder a spectrum of ideas about perspective, composition, beauty, ethics, historical evolution, perception, “perversions”….

It is Sheppard’s hallmark to upset the applecart of expectations about human and sexual identities, blurring all boundaries and definitions. His exquisite line drawing is a seductive vine to lead the viewer into a world where there exist fantastic visions and unexpected couplings. It is a leap into a possibly more real depiction of the multiplicity of life – the hidden and pleasurable actions of the unspoken.

Aaron Sheppard is a recent recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Achievement Award.  He has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, Austria, Volume 1E Brooklyn, New York, and galleries in Tokyo, Beijing, London, Las Vegas and Washington DC. Sheppard has performed in “Conceptualizing the Body: Gaze, Masquerade, and Spectacle”, at SUNY College in OldWestbury, New York, the Fringe Festival in Australia, and shown video in, Maid in China(town), Chinese Biennale, Ku Art Center, Beijing China. His work has been written about in BOMB magazine, Artillery, The Huffington Post, Las Vegas Weekly, among others.

In The Main Gallery: ERIC FREEMAN: New Paintings

You can also find current information on the film including screening dates at the official “Beauty Is Embarrassing” Website HERE

http://www.ferntv.ca/FERN_TV/BeautyIsEmbarrassing.html

http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/04/26/whats-hot-at-hot-docs-3/

http://lockerz.com/s/204377844

http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashville/hometown-heroes-among-the-big-winners-at-the-43rd-nashville-film-festival/Content?oid=2851716

http://www.nowtoronto.com/guides/hotdocs/2012/story.cfm?content=186430

http://www.nowtoronto.com/guides/hotdocs/2012/story.cfm?content=186430

http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/the-buzz/2012/04/hot-docs-picks.html

http://dorkshelf.com/2012/04/24/hotdocs-2012-preview-the-reviews-part-2/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJVd0kvTn6w

http://www.wnpt.org/mediaupdate/2012/04/18/media-update-a-conversation-with-artist-wayne-white/

http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?llr=8swheqcab&v=001zmrtXGWWEwb8ZMKQERn-amvQEedi6MXx_u9tL9cjtmsFmzPG7eXX7CdAAuzyephbnyxP_VNEksQfKhzYEKnSbftl1HvMBcVciesAKJS8Cx8%3D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9qw3uOR23A

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reeligion/2012/03/the-best-film-i-saw-at-south-by-southwest/

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/film-festivals/sxsw-2012-review-beauty-is-embarrassing-kkell.php

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/beauty-is-embarrassing-sxsw-301711

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117947258/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/16/beauty-is-embarrassing_n_1349240.html?ref=arts

http://austin.culturemap.com/newsdetail/03-14-12-16-51-home-made-success-ibeauty-is-embarrassingi-is-a-quirky-uplifting-doc-of-artist-wayne-white/

http://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2012-03-16/beauty-is-embarrassing/

http://www.profwagstaff.com/2012/03/11/sxsw12-beauty-is-embarrassingsinister/

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/03/beauty-is-embarrassing-wayne-white/

http://mirror80.com/2012/03/beauty-is-embarrassing/

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/54235

ArtScene
by Marlena Donohue

Imagine how the world looks as you drive in a moderated rain and see your environment through wet glass as you drive relentlessly from the eerie glow of busy streetlights to the quiet darkness of some shrouded woods. That is the way it feels to see the airbrush perfect paintings of Samantha Fields. Fields takes literally thousands of photos of locales – urban, unpeopled – and archives these for later culling to become the subjects of these canvases. “Subject” must be used gingerly here as the manner in which Fields reconstitutes the scenes has the minutest relationship to the L.A. sunsets or the forested spaces in the record. She has mastered pigment so that she achieves these animate, moist surfaces recalling something akin to Renaissance varnishing, but then hides what she depicts in an almost milky veil. The effect is precisely like the world viewed in motion and through liquid. This tension makes for images that hang between things we know and things barely recalled. The paintings are able to call up something so specific and loaded as city lights seen from afar (with all the alienation that urban trope raises in us) and something so generic as the inscrutable constancy of nature; this has been done so much that Fields’ credit is the freshness and believability she can still wrest fro this betwixt-between format and its related speculations (Western Project, Culver City)