Past Exhibition
Introductions: DTW >>> LAX
May 4 – June 8, 2014
Artists Reception: Sunday, May 4, 2014, 5 - 7 p.m.
IMAGES
During a Detroit visit last spring with MFA painting students at Cranbrook Acadamy of Art, gallery director Clyde Beswick was introduced to the work of three artists, Anna Breininger, Erica Mahinay and Lauren Satlowski, all of whom were planning to move to Los Angeles upon graduation. As the first in a series of planned exhibitions introducing young artists, CB1 Gallery is pleased to present their work in our new exhibition, Introductions: DTW >>> LAX which opens on May 4, 2014 and will be on view through June 8. The gallery will host a reception for the artists on Sunday, May 4, 5 - 7 p.m.
The first of the three 2013 Cranbrook MFA graduates in the exhibition, Anna Breininger constructs situations of irregularity by using architecturally charged patterns and motifs. Tape rips, forms fade, and surfaces shift from horizontal to vertical. Geometry, sourced from ubiquitous tile designs, is employed as a trigger for non-neutrality and betrays the flimsiness of our relationship to surface.
ANNA BREININGER, Fading (in the den), 2014, acrylic on panel, 44" x 40"
Erica Mahinay is seduced by surface in its ability to exist as a skin, a membrane, a superficial definition, but also in its position as a boundary. Her work references the body and the self as well as landscape or interior spaces. They are ultimately hinged on abstraction and, on some level, they reference a generation of artists who sought to collapse action, gesture and the body into one ideal, sublime, moment, but through a constant negotiation with surface and illusion, Mahinay’s recent paintings seem to displace rather than collapse, creating a new whole, which relies on its fragments and irregularity. Their translucency allows for a push/pull between material and image. Surface becomes the medium, which conjures not an illusion, but rather, resituates the present moment as a glimmer, an in-between. In addition to her paintings, sculptures, plaster forms with sphere-like footing, are dictated by gravity, conscious of their tipping point.
ERICA MAHINAY, Thin Skin #23: Lacuna, 2014, acrylic medium, nylon and polyester, 71" x 95.5"
The psychedelic imagery prevalent in Lauren Satlowski’s paintings and sculptures are the result of both a sincere desire toward transcendence and a self-aware puppet show. Satlowski constructs the foundation for her work using the common figurine. Rich with associative qualities, the figurine evokes meaning both personal and collective, and provides a cultural norm that can be dismantled and reconstructed. Satlowski constructs an identity and an environment that allow the subject to exceed its mass-produced origin, becoming iconic and singular. In this process the figurine becomes a stand in for the human body, the picture plane becomes a window to an alternate reality, and the familiar object becomes host to the unknown. |
