Kia Pedersen, A Change in the Wind, Dec. 15 - Jan. 23, 2012

Sara Nightingale Gallery is pleased to present Kia Pedersen, A Change in the Wind, opening Saturday, Dec. 15, from 5 - 8 p.m.

  Trained as a printmaker, sculptor, painter and architect, Pedersen fuses these practices to achieve her goal of subverting traditional methods of printmaking. She deconstructs the standard intaglio printmaking process by rearranging and/ or eliminating certain steps. Her prints begin as thick, dense asphaltum paintings whose complex history and texture generate varied unique surfaces. Engaging an earthy and mineral-rich palette of inks, some of her best intaglio prints express a tactile grittiness and surprising depth. Often, her dramatically eroded and brittle, lace-like copper plates never make it to press, only and always to exist as striking sculptural reliefs.

  In Pedersen's current work she omits the printing process altogether. Asphaltum is applied directly to a copper plate, and organic materials, such as salt water from the bays near her Shelter Island studio, are used to corrode the remaining exposed area. Process and material determine the final outcome rather than planned compositional schemes. Recently, she has been using the wind as her source of formal composition. As a result, some of the works reveal a pattern of orderly directional marks, while others seem to have derived from eddies and swirls. Pedersen, an accomplished sailor, is sensitive to subtle changes in the wind and allows them the autonomy to determine design. Although the work is co-authored with the wind, it is unified by a set of parameters; medium, process, material and palette are the constants that give the work its voice.

  The exhibition will run through Jan. 23rd. For more information and images contact Sara Nightingale at sara@saranightingale.com

  Image: Kia Pedersen, Wind/ Tar Series #6, tar and sea salt on copper, 30" x 30"

Thanksgiving/ Gratitude party, Friday, Nov. 23, 6 - 8 p.m.

Please join us at the gallery on Friday, Nov. 23 from 6 - 8 for an evening of music with Dalton Portella and Jorge Castano. Eric Dever's exhibition, s.Ram, Red, White, and Black Paintings has been extended until Dec. 12. We are celebrating Thanksgiving and Gratitude with music, drinks and fun. See you there.

Eric Dever Open House, Sat. - Mon. November 9 - 12

Please join us in celebrating the opening of the new Parrish Art Museum this weekend. The gallery will be hosting an Open House from 11 - 8 p.m. on Saturday, Sunday and Monday of this weekend. Come view Eric Dever's stunning solo show and have a glass of wine with us.

Eric Dever, s.Ram: Red, White and Black Paintings opening Saturday, Oct. 20, 2012

The methods and materials of painting have long been the subject of Dever's practice. Since 2006, he has worked exclusively in black and white on a variety of supports. For this, his fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, Dever has expanded into the color red. His intention is to bring color back into his work through a slow, deliberate process, one color at a time. 

In 2011, Dever traveled to Southern France, through Languedoc, a land marked by wars and wine. For inspiration, he packed Roland Barthes’ essay, Wine and Milk. "Red, while also the color of blood, is above all a converting substance capable of reversing situations and states, and of extracting from objects their opposites. Hence its old alchemical heredity, its philosophical power to transmute and create ex nihilo."

Dever's yoga practice has introduced him to the three gunas and their corresponding colors and qualities: tamas, or black, darkness, matter; satva, or white, light and the ether sphere; and rajas, red, the energy which binds each of these qualities as well as all existence. This association compelled Dever to introduce Naphthol Scarlet Red to his existing palette of Titanium White and Ivory Black. Since doing so, he has discovered an unlimited succession of outcomes and unearthed a wide range of red tints, shades and tones. The essence of Dever's work resides in his mixing proportions of light, energy and matter.

The exhibition opens on Saturday, Oct. 20 with a reception from 6 - 8 p.m. and will run through Nov. 21st. For more information and images, contact Sara Nightingale at sara@saranightingale.com. 631-793-2256.

images: Eric Dever, NSIBTW-13, NSIBTW-17, oil on canvas, 36" x 36" each, photo credit Gary Mamay

Perry Burns, A Picture's Half Silence

                 

                  Sara Nightingale Gallery is pleased to present, A Picture's Half Silence, a solo exhibition of new works by Perry Burns, opening Saturday, June 30 from 6 - 8 p.m

                   A well known abstract painter, Burns has for years been making oil paintings imbued with Islamic motifs and patterns. Spirituality, both personal and collective, has always played an important role in his work. Since 9/11, however, while continuing to produce his velvety, layered abstractions, Burns has been exploring political issues surrounding Islamic cultures, particularly events and imagery that have been filtered and distorted by the media, as well as by our personal perspectives and prejudices.

                  The works are primarily about crowds and often depict either scenes of uprisings or people engaged in prayer. Technology and it's ability to function as both a tool of peace -The Arab Spring and Twitter, for example- and of war, is evoked in the works by colorful square pixels that often conceal large sections of the source photographs in these mixed media works. Drawing from licensed imagery that he finds online, as well as from his own photographs, Burns has developed an elaborate process of transferring photographic images to large scale canvasses. Even in the work itself, technology plays a central role.

                  In Jali, a square painting in which a photograph of a group of Islamic women is nearly indiscernible due to the application of a black pixelated pattern such as one that might be found in a QR Code, the title refers to a term for a perforated stone or latticed screen common in Islamic architecture. The pattern obstructs an image of Pakistani women wearing burqas and thus reveals multiple layers of separation between the viewer (us) and the subjects of the painting (them). 

In his Satellite images, Burns employs military aerial photos taken from space of "target" locations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. While the imagery suggests future strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles, Burns finds beauty in these contemporary "pre-strike" landscapes and embellishes them with swatches of patterned color. 

The exhibition will run through July 30. For more information and images contact Sara Nightingale, 631-793-2256 or reply to this email.

Image: Perry Burns, Revolution #11, mixed media on canvas, 60" x 80", 2012

Justin West, End of an Error

Sara Nightingale Gallery is pleased to present End of an Error, a solo exhibition by rising Harlem artist Justin West organized by Georgette Grier-Key.

The exhibition's title is a spin off of Damien Hirst's 2010 exhibition at Gagosian, End of an Era, which included a wall of paintings of diamonds that sold for hefty prices despite the hovering economic crisis. The pièce de résistance was Hirst's 2009 sculpture of the same name, a severed bull's head with golden horns suspended in formaldehyde and encased in a golden vitrine. While the Golden Calf refers to the worshipping of a false idol, Hirst's bull "demystified the biblical tale and, by extension, debunked his own myth-making," according to the press release.

The false idol is an essential motivator for West, who rejects the recent art world trend of hyped, overproduced, assembly line art which has dominated the market in the past several years. Despite critiques such as Hirst's on the "bling" aspect of the art world, and this year's Whitney Biennial's rejection of it, artists with factories and assistants - Wei Wei, Wiley, Koons, and Hirst himself - continue to thrive within the system. Working in solitude in his Harlem studio, West relishes the intimacy of stretching his own canvasses, mixing his own paints, and the extremely personal experience of laying paint on canvas. Yet he does not work in a vacuum. Much of his subject matter refers to the work of successful contemporary artists of today, even while he is critical of their processes.

West writes of "Check Mate", the image attached, "I am aiming to communicate the fall of a crippled but inflated industry, but also the rise of something pure, strong, and beautiful. The wolf represents beauty and the hand that combats the wrong, while the robot symbolizes the machine that drives mankind downward, the rapid advance of technology, which is increasingly becoming an invisible bully. Computers are replacing people, therefore people don't have jobs. Superman being defaced in my works represents the country and its struggle right now."

Fusing pop imagery with old master styling, West employs animated characters such as Lambchop and Superman. Not only are they nostalgic pop characters, for West
they also represent the economy, patriotism, and the underdog.

This is West's debut solo exhibition.

End of an Error will run from May 26 - June 26. For more information and images contact Sara Nightingale at sara@saranightingale.com
Image: Justin West, Check Mate, acrylic on canvas, 60" x 70", 2012

Sara Nightingale Gallery

visit/ ship: 688 Montauk Highway

Water Mill, NY 11976

mail: PO Box 2646 

Sag harbor, NY 11963

631-793-2256

www.saranightingale.com

LA-X through May 22nd

Ed Ruscha's 1965-68 painting was prescient. The Los Angeles County Museum is on Fire. Rather, Los Angeles County itself is and has been a sizzling breeding ground of artistic development since World War II. But until recently art historians have generally downplayed the region, emphasizing New York instead as the center of post-war art in America. Even as recently as January 2012, an article in Art + Auction Magazine posited that Richard Diebenkorn "remains undervalued today" because his prices were compromised by his decision to remain on the West Coast*.

    Enter Pacific Standard Time, the Getty Foundation and Research Institute's initiative comprising a series of exhibitions, public programs, grants and publications spanning more than 60 cultural institutions in Southern California. The primary mission of PST is to document what its organizers consider to be a "collective rethinking of the region's art history". Beginning last fall and continuing through the Spring of 2012, PST surveys the main ideas, movements and moments in California art between 1945 and 1980, years that bracketed a period of unprecedented development.

    Skip ahead three hours. Here on the other coast The Parrish Art Museum presents EST-3, Art from Los Angeles in the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection. Billed as "a playful rejoinder" to PST, EST-3, which runs from March 4 - June 17th, focuses on art made in California in the same period. For viewers who won't be making the trip to LA this year, The Parrish exhibition includes works by many of the important PST artists and is a good synopsis of the Getty project.

    LA-X  will run concurrently with EST-3 and takes off where PST ends. A group show of mostly under-recognized artists living and working in Los Angeles, LA-X focuses on artists born between 1960 and 1980, the same years that much of the PST work was being made. This is also the unofficial demographic of Generation X, thus the hyphenated X in the show's title. Many of the artists in the exhibition have migrated to LA from elsewhere, viewing Los Angeles as a cultural destination, so the reference to the city's airport seems apt.

    The LA art scene has been described as a multi-generational social ecosystem, and the participant list of artists in this exhibition evolved organically, through a network of recommendations by friends and colleagues. Rather than focusing on a particular movement or style, the show reflects the diversity and eclectic energy emanating from the Golden State at this time. Now that the art world has become more globalized, in part because of the proliferation of art fairs and the internet, is it even possible for a regional aesthetic or movement to exist? How has living in LA influenced these artists (or not)? And what impact, if any, have the PST artists had on them? The exhibition will examine these issues generally as well as the specific concerns of the artists involved.

    For more information and images contact Sara Nightingale. sara@saranightingale.com

    LA-X will run through May 20th.

    Sophia Allison
    Leon Benn
    Michael Blasi
    Colin Burns
    Karen Chu
    Stephanie Farr
    J. Bennet Fitts
    Alexa Gerrity
    Karl Hahn
    Joshua Levine
    Devon Oder
    Josh Peters
    Colin Roberts
    Cole Sternberg
    Nicola Vruwink
    Annie Wharton

* Judd Tully, Artist Dossier, Richard Diebenkorn, Art + Auction, January 2012
Alexa Gerrity, Let's Call it Valencia,  still from video

Sara Nightingale Gallery
visit/ ship: 688 Montauk Highway
Water Mill, NY 11976
mail: PO Box 2646
Sag harbor, NY 11963
631-793-2256
www.saranightingale.com

Joseph Stabilito, new paintings, Feb. 18 - March 29

Joseph Stabilito, new paintings from Feb. 18 - March 29.