Gary Baseman: The Door Is Always Open | The first major museum survey of the artist's life and work features paintings, photographs, toys, sketchbooks, and videos, presented in a novel gallery setting that evokes Baseman's childhood home, replete with family snapshots and furnishings.
Organized thematically, Gary Baseman: The Door Is Always Open examines the many facets of Baseman's creativity and underscores the influence of his Jewish upbringing and American popular culture on his career. The exhibition presents more than 300 artworks and objects from his prodigious output and eclectic collections. Highlights include vibrant illustrations for the New Yorker and Rolling Stone; title card paintings and maquettes for Baseman's Emmy Award-winning animated television series Teacher's Pet; iconic artwork for the popular board game Cranium; and many of Baseman's beloved, limited-edition designer toys. Also on display are examples of Baseman's richly symbolic, sometimes dark paintings and documentation of his celebratory performance art. In a separate gallery that recalls Baseman's art studio, visitors can take a look at many of the artist's sketchbooks and create art of their own.
Affinities: Olga Seem and Maritta Tapanainen | Focusing on the contrasting disciplines of drawing and collage, Affinities highlights the shared intricacies that both artists bring to their individual approaches examining the micro-macrocosm world around them. The biological definition of affinity is 'a relationship or resemblance in structure between species that suggests a common origin,' which very aptly describes the creative evolution of these two artists.
Olga Seem has cultivated a definitive style, using a mixed medium of ink and acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, in producing her combination painting and drawings which contrast systematic grids and cropped fields with fluid, organic forms suggestive of marine life. Using a pointillistic inspired approach, she creates a background of a grid composed of ink-drawn circles. Although systematic, each section develops a rhythm of its own and forming a pulsing background to the superimposed features of ocean anomalies, detritus and mandalas. These elements are often accented with a light acrylic wash which adds to the distillation of the object as if on display or under observation in a science lab.
Maritta Tapanainen has elevated the art of collage to a master level using pre-printed cut paper as a 'drawing' technique, layering biomorphic fretwork to create what looks like a delineated orchestration of microscopic particles. In her acute attention to detail, Tapanainen uses images from old technological and medical manuals from which she diligently cuts out her "lines" used in constructing her imagery. Similar to Olga Seem's backgrounds, Tapanainen creates a backdrop for these celestial looking amalgamations using a grid pattern constructed from squares of monochromatic paper (unlike Seem's work, Tapanainen uses no other materials than the appropriated cut paper). The imagery itself ventures from the heavens, with exploding celestial bodies suggesting galaxies, milky ways and novas, down to beneath the oceans where swarm amoebas and a vast population of microscopic organisms.
Alexis Smith: Second Nature | In this exhibition, Alexis Smith employs found paint-by-number and black velvet landscapes overlaid with remnants of popular culture and pithy literary references that combine to offer multi-dimensional readings into our relationship with Nature and our mental construct of landscapes.
Describing Smith's work in the catalogue of her mid-career survey at the Whitney and MOCA in 1991-92, Richard Armstrong wrote, "her work exists in the gap between text and image, past and present, word and thing, ordinary and extraordinary. She unites thought and physical perception, relying on the eye and memory to make a synthesis. Smith's brand of Pop infused Conceptualism has been compared to the highly irreverent, yet equally serious work of other L.A. icons, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and Mike Kelley.
Simone Shubuck: Do You Like Old Things, or New Things That Look Old | "Do you like old things, or new things that look old?" is a question Shubuck heard a teenage boy ask his friend many years ago. The idea resonated with her and became the inspiration for this current exhibition. With her new series of energetic works on paper, Shubuck considers our relationship with the past and acknowledges that oftentimes what we think of as "new" are really old ideas re-imagined, recycled or "knocked off." While the present moment is defined by an ever-accelerating pace of innovation, the past is always close at hand providing inspiration and perspective.
Using analog materials of paper, pencil, crayon and paint, the artist communicates using a visual language rooted in floral and plant life. Collaging old drawings, antique photographs and lithographs into the work gives her a path to directly and physically embrace the past. Dense areas of detailed linework and fluid, abstract gestural fields of color create a palpable push and pull in the work. Focusing on this tension makes Shubuck's latest body of work feel completely new.
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