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Sharon Louden the dancing line new paintings, new drawings Join us for an opening reception and book event, showcasing new paintings and drawings by Sharon Louden as well as her new book, Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists. Opening reception will include not only a celebration of Sharon's new work, but also an introduction, question and answer period and book signing by Sharon Louden and back-cover contributor, Michael Straus. January 7 - February 14, 2014 opening Tuesday, January 7, 6-9pm |
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| beta pictoris gallery is excited to present the dancing line: new paintings and drawings, Sharon Louden’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Louden, an internationally renowned artist, curator, lecturer and editor, has recently completed a major site-specific installation as well as a major animation that explored both the practices and processes of contemporary markmaking. For her exhibition at beta pictoris she will present an exciting new range of paintings and drawings that continue her ongoing exploration of both recognizable and abstract forms that all revolve around the gesture, the mark, the foundation of an image at its most understandable level. Louden’s ongoing emphasis on abstraction highlights her love of imagery which hovers just on the edges of the identifiable. She loves what she terms the anthropomorphic, shapes and gestures that suggest something recognizable, something identifiable, something that allows viewers to bring their own histories, memories, understandings and impressions into the works. Rather than share a single, concrete image, Louden creates a field in which viewers can follow their own personal threads across a picture’s painted plane or a drawing’s gently traced lines. On the exhibition’s opening night, Louden and back-cover contributor Michael Straus, Chairman of the Board of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, will share their thoughts and have a discussion on her new book Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists. After experiencing many of the challenges professional artists face, and drawing upon her decades of experience as both an artist and an educator, Louden reached out to forty professional artists who generously shared their thoughts and strategies on how they were able to live and sustain a creative life. Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists was published by Intellect Books and is distributed by University of Chicago Press |
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Melissa Vandenberg S.O.S. January 7 - February 14, 2014 opening Tuesday, January 7, 6-9pm |
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| beta pictoris gallery is excited to present S.O.S., Vandenberg’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Drawing on fifteen years of innovation across a diverse range of media including sculpture, works on paper and performance, in S.O.S. Vandenberg challenges viewers, ever so softly, to consider their personal constructions of self, identity, place and nation. As she states on her website, “identity is in the home we create, the goods we possess and in the land we live.” Anchoring S.O.S. is a series of works through which Vandenberg continues to explore her fascination with the iconography of identity. In Sink or Swim: Family Style (shown above), three life vests fashioned from salvaged American flags hang from a handmade wall-mount. Repetition is a motif central to Vandenberg’s production. Recalling Gilles Deleuze’s pronouncement that only that which is alike differs, and only differences are alike, Vandenberg inserts selected symbols, such as stars or stripes, and certain texts, such as the word EXIT, within many of her works. Both the three-dimensional Clouds of Vertical Development – a hand-fabricated, multi-media three-dimensional Exit sign with an electrical cord tail, and EXIT, a collaged multi-media photograph from the Seen, Not Heard series, each use a typographically similar text. It is almost as if Vandenberg has taken the negative space created by removing the term from the former and layered it over the latter creating an oscillating relationship between these two series. It is this type of subtle understandings of the ways in which an artist can move within and between media that makes Vandenberg’s long history as a practitioner evident. Rather than be trapped within the confines of a medium for fear of stepping outside it, she is as comfortable within one as she is within another. She also revisits methods, but reinterprets their meanings. Drawing on the matchstick drawing methods of her 1998 Untitled (Match Drawing Series) (image hereunder) works, Vandenberg is now producing new pieces which scorch paper, but she has turned towards the figurative, using many of the same icons that appear in her collages and three-dimensional works.  Vandenberg will also present a new performance, Zoetrope, that will expand on her recent project Sew to Speak. Performance is central to her practice, as is engagement through media including blogs and tumblr. At beta pictoris Vandenberg will recontextualize our relationships with the mechanical and the machine, altering our understandings of both its uses and its values. As she explains, one of her hopes is to blur the boundaries between “private and public.” Perhaps then it will be time to send an S.O.S. |
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| installation of Lay Away at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art |
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Leslie Smith III new work Feb 21 - March 21 2014 opening Friday, February 21, 6-9pm |
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Travis Somerville new work April 4 - May 16 2014 opening Friday, April 4, 6-9pm |
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Charles Lutz new work exact dates TBA |
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Eugene James Martin (1938 - 2005) the early years exact dates TBA |