Summer 2018

On View: Wednesday June 6th – Saturday, September 8th

Private Opening Reception: Saturday, June 2nd to coincide with the Museum Gala. RSVP Required

Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Casta Paintings

Douglas Melini, When the Moon Hangs on the Wall: Landscapes, Seascapes, and Abstracts

Esther Ruiz, Hyperion

Karla Wozniak, I Often Dream of Mountains

Image caption: Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Mulata, Ink on Tyvek Collage, 80×40 inches, 2017

Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Casta Paintings

Anchored in feminism, my work is informed by North and South American cultural forms that become fused together. My practice is a bicultural and trans-cultural experience; it speaks of difference and opposites. I grew up in Colombia and migrated to the US when I became an adult. Today, I make art in two languages dealing with the curious and extraordinary experience of roaming between these two worlds. Yet, there is an important piece of myself rooted in Colombia. I create visual expressions dealing with hybridity and syncretism that has taken place since the conquest of the Americas which is replicated and experienced in the migration process. I am currently creating a visual novel comprised of paintings, sculptures and mixed media that together, and in different voices, weave a coexistence of dialogues, passages, punctuations, and silences about this hybridity and of cultural ownership. It is a multi-narrative novel about memory, migration and the pursuit of the American dream. These images are rooted in Minimalism as a dominant ideological umbrella. They are intertwined to make narratives that describe lives in spiritual and physical transit.

Bio

Exhibitions include the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Joslyn Art Museum, The Portland Museum of Art, The Museum of the University of New Mexico, El Museo del Barrio, Museo del Arte de Puerto Rico, University at Albany Art Museum, Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, Bogotá; San Luis Obispo Art Center and Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Friedemann- Sánchez was selected for the Elisabeth Sackler Feminist Art Base at the Brooklyn Museum, awarded the Smithsonian Artist Fellowship, a Puffin Foundation grant, a Pollock Krasner grant, a NALAC grant and was nominated to the Rema Hort Mann and to the Anonymous was a Woman Foundation, received the acheivement award from the Nebraska Arts Council.  Residencies include Art OMI, Fountainhead, Tamarind Institute, Yaddo, Gasworks Triangle Arts, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and Bronx Museum for the Arts.

Main Gallery:

Image caption: Douglas Melini, Starry Sky (#1),Oil and acrylic on canvas with artist frame, 42×31.5 inches, 2018

Douglas Melini, When the Moon Hangs on the Wall: Landscapes, Seascapes, and Abstracts

Ever since I can remember I’ve been drawn to color; it’s the foundation of some of my earliest memories and it has become the groundwork for my painting practice. I was introduced to the medium of painting as a young child, but I wasn’t exposed to the history of painting until I began to visit art museums in my late teens. From that moment on, I was hooked. In my studio practice I’m constantly mining this history, looking and surveying to see how painters of the past used the medium to create unique visual spaces that connect with the time in which they were made. Because of paintings long history, one can easily reach back to earlier models as a way of moving forward.

My paintings explore both the abstract and pictorial nature of making an image. The drawn line is loaded with so much information and emotion, it sets up the basic elements of a pictorial space such as figure and ground. These basics elements are a vital necessity for recognizing objects through vision. They inform how we read an image and allow us to create and experience a space that has meaning for us.

I like to think of my paintings as being built, put together part by part. The paintings are made by layering elements through a collage like process and their surfaces reveal this process. I build up a surface like an architectural space, one level at a time, where every step is apparent, until finally a finished state is revealed, presenting the viewer with very distinct visual elements that coalesce into an overall image. The starting point is a grid like patterned space. Atop this network sits thick knifed on, smeared, and brushed layers of oil paint, creating surfaces of paint that are both thin and transparent as well as thick and sculptural. The surfaces become landscapes of both our inner and outer spaces.

The paintings are finished with hand-painted/stained artist frames. The frames operate as a sort of view finder for the contained images. They fuse image and object, making the paintings functionally akin to a devotional piece; this connects the work to my interest in the relationship between the maker and viewer of revered objects. While my aim for the viewing experience is not strictly speaking spiritual, an intuitive spirit resonates in the process of construing and finding meaning. My paintings offer the viewer an encounter with geometry, patterning, and color which reflects both the micro and macro spaces of the world we live in today.

Bio

(b. 1972) lives and works in New York. He was educated at CalArts, LA (MFA) and the University of Maryland, College Park (BA). Melini has had solo exhibitions at Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR (2018); Philip Slein Gallery, St. Louis, MO (2017); 11R, NY (2017); Feature Inc., NY (2012), NY; The Suburban, Oak Park, IL (2011); Minus Space, Brooklyn (2009); a White Room at White Columns, NY (2003); and Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica (1998), among others. Group exhibitions include People, Place and Things… at Philip Slein Gallery, St. Louis, MO (2018); Breaking Pattern at Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR (2015), Minus Space: A Survey of Reductive and Post Minimal Work, curated by Phong Bui, at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY (2008); and Two by Two for Aids and Art at Dallas Art Museum, Dallas, TX (2003), among others. His work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, The New Criterion, Time Out, and New York Magazine.

Treehaven Gallery:

Image caption: Esther Ruiz,Well XIII, Neon, plexiglass, MDF, paint, hardware, 24x18x3 inches, 2017

Esther Ruiz, Hyperion

Inspired by space operas, pop culture, geometry and the setting sun, Ruiz creates objects that operate simultaneously as miniature landscapes from a distant future and actual size sculptures informed by the family of Minimalism. The cylinder, the semicircle, the triangle, and other Euclidean forms are combined into colorful and expressive freestanding sculpture. She tops cast cement columns with Plexiglas triangles, neon arches and fractured geodes in a way that leaves viewers thinking of (among other things) Dan Flavin, Pink Floyd and the stark beauty of the desert.

The newer works, shifting away from the cylindrical forms, but still adhering to a strict material diet, act as objects from these landscapes. Some act as tomes, containing foreign information; others as stand-ins for familiar domestic objects but with fundamental idiosyncrasies. As sparse and concise as these pieces are, this work is replete with inherent feuds. Ruiz somehow manages to investigate and celebrate both fictional landscapes and material honesty. It is elegantly abstract and evocatively representational and, in the way she positions synthetic and natural materials together, she creates a tiny battle over those materials’ permanence in relation to each other.

Bio

Received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sculpture from Rhodes College in 2011. Ruiz has shown nationally and internationally at various galleries including HILDE, yours mine & ours gallery, New Release Gallery, Planthouse Gallery, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Platform Baltimore, Vox Populi, Field Projects, Fridman Gallery, Regina Rex, and The American Center for Physics. In 2015, Spaceworks awarded her the Artist Grant and Williamsburg Studio Lottery. Ruiz was born in Houston, Texas, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Entry Gallery:

Image caption: Karla Wozniak, Ascent, oil on canvas, 60×60 inches, 2016

Karla Wozniak, I Often Dream of Mountains

The exhibition I Often Dream of Mountains by painter Karla Wozniak comprises paintings of natural landscapes infused with ecstatic energy. The show includes large-scale paintings of mountains and smaller paintings of window views. In these paintings tactile marks, playful forms, and exuberant color combine to form images that buzz between representation and abstraction.

Wozniak’s woven marks build and morph into sweeping vistas. Mountains appear and erode before our eyes. The larger paintings overwhelm with their manic energy, are alive with a density of marks and colors—mountains have become places of mystery and magic. The smaller paintings are more intimate and ground the viewer as an observer. In these, visionary landscapes are seen through window frames, echoing the form of painting as window or portal. What in the larger pieces is an engulfing experience becomes here a space of contemplation, longing, and projection.

Flamboyantly composed and rendered, Wozniak’s paintings feel deeply personal. Taking the observed landscape as a starting-off point, these works form their own hallucinatory and fantastical world. The possess a visionary quality that links to a lineage of American painting running through artists like Arthur Dove and Charles Burchfield, where the landscape is a vehicle for imagination and emotional response.

Bio

Received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. Her recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco, CA and group exhibitions at the Knoxville Museum of Art and Regina Rex in New York, NY. Wozniak’s distinctions include a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship; participation in the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace program; participation in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program; and two MacDowell Colony fellowships. Her work has been featured in a number of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Village Voice, and The Huffington Post, among others. Her work is included in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Knoxville Museum of Art permanent collections. Wozniak is currently an Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.