A sense of place, is a group exhibition of selected artwork that surveys the geographic and metaphysical features of a homogenous world, gathered to demonstrate a hauntingly conscious understanding of the expansibility of time and space. The exhibition include works by Francis Acea, John Bailly, Ananda Balingit-LeFils, Cassie Marie Edwards, Mark Messersmith, Jonathan Rockford, Douglas Voisin, David Willett, Jessica Wohl, John Zoller, and opens on Friday, October 15th from 7:00 – 11:00 p.m.
A sense of place showcases ten established and emerging contemporary artists – whose disciplinary range and contrasting styles are characterize by a diverse blend of tradition and technology – delineates the premise of this exhibit, using a visual language that transport the ordinary to the sublime; integrating cultural segments, ecological awareness and psychosocial perceptions. Put together with the intent to projects a general mood or particular mindset derived from humanity’s quest to maintain today’s definitive lifestyle and its inevitable consequences, it encapsulates the paradoxes of life, delivering a narrative generated by intimate explorations of the mundanely familiar and a collective reverberation of uncertainty… engaging in underlying conversations regarding personal notions of what is relevant to the significance of our existence. Through imagery that details cerebral reflections of the conditions we impose onto ourselves as well as our surroundings, a sense of place, offers a holistic observation of a topic that is blatant and obscured, microcosmic and infinite.
Cassie Marie Edward’s quietly bold oil and watercolor paintings of unremarkable interiors – so void of character that the glow emanating from outside the room becomes the focal point in her compositions– depict a sanctuary laced with isolation and light…while the highly detailed, iconic ink drawings of Jessica Wohl’s suburban mega homes define the topography and display the unsettling uniformity of the status quo. Suggesting that perhaps, all is not well in suburbia, she uses a distorted perspective to reveals ominous personalities behind the reassuring guise of their pre-fabricated facades.
Meticulously rendered, Ananda Balingits-Lefil’s mixed media compositions of guache and pencil, direct attention to patterned fabrics – rather than the human subjects – to convey both an individual and global identity through the static elegance of colonial portraiture…in contrast, John Zoller’s playful use of scale and color redefines symbolic representations of traditional art into “Rorschach-like” abstractions by using illustrations from dogmatic design publications as inspiration and tools for self-expression.
Simple and direct, Francis Acea’s acrylic paintings of text, moralize an all-encompassing point with his usage of language as iconography that carries on to a collage suite of the letter W – materialized from cyberspace in a one-day search on the internet – demonstrating the facility of accessing information from an evidently endless resource in another dimension…on the other hand, the interdisciplinary installations of Jonathan Rockford, inwardly explore elemental frontiers through his ambiguously tangible projections that softly contemplate barriers, depths and distances.
Mark Messersmith’s vibrant oil paintings are maximalist portrayals of paradisiacal nature impudently disrupted by the daily grind of civilization, replicating vistas that evoke harmony and angst from vantage points inside the remote locations…while Douglas Voisin’s aerial photographs chronicles his take-offs and landings from the comforts of a pressurized cabin, producing images that provide a bird’s eye view of configured shapes and patterns on the ground below that confirm the dislodgement of nature to accommodate and sustain human populations.
Reminiscent of early maps, John Bailly’s paintings express pluralism and look into the influence of conflict in forming a unified identity, focusing on cities that have been constructed, destructed and reconstructed to supply evidence of the resilience of a settlement and the bond of community…although David Willet’s deceptively calming oil paintings also offer a satellite view of the Earth, it is in the disorienting form of a parallel world appearing disturbingly close to our own, whose imminent danger metaphorically recounts mankind’s capacity to destroy itself.
Guerra De La Paz. 2010
Curated by Guerra de la Paz. From Oct 15th through Dec 19th, 2010.
Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art
158 NW 91st Street
Miami, FL 33150
305.490.6906
www.cjazzart.com
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