Group Show: En Plein Air RELOADED
Image: Claudia Hart, Still from Timegarden 02, one hour loop, 2006 / ©Claudia Hart
Press Release / June 7 - July 16, 2007
Black & White Gallery is pleased to present En Plein Air RELOADED, a multi-venue group exhibition featuring indoor and outdoor works by nine artists who employ diverse materials and techniques to address the uneasy balance between the natural and the constructed environment.
Contrary to the notion of painting en plein air, artists in this exhibition create their landscapes in their studio. As a result, the romantic landscape is dismissed as a cliché, yet “reloaded” as postmodern foil to the inescapably synthetic reality of urban experience.
The works range from the evocative paintings of Amy Talluto, Michael Van den Besselaar and Andrew Casner, to the photographic fantasylands of Fiona Gardner, to the elaborately bottled and boxed natural landscapes of Kim Holleman and Kathleen Vance. The idea of a rift between society and nature emerges in Claudia Hart’s 3D animated film, which reworks a Renaissance appreciation of the pastoral while erasing all traces of human presence or civilized habitation. A darker side to this tense relationship emerges in images of environmental destruction, figuring strongly in Kim Holleman’s table-top model of a cake sculpted from toxic waste and Christopher Duffy’s oxidized lawn. In the outdoor site-specific installation, Lauren Luloff gets caught up in her own emotional seascape between memory and future by exposing fragile fabrics and paint to the grandiose horizons of the physical world.
The intriguing relationship between these artists is the way in which they explore memory, travel, fantasy, escape and subvert the traditional genre of landscape.
Artists included:
Michael Van den Besselaar
Andrew Casner
Christopher Duffy
Claudia Hart
Kim Holleman
Fiona Gardner
Lauren Luloff
Amy Talluto
Kathleen Vance