Sunday, February 19, 2012

5 Submerging


PRACTICAL INFORMATION:

5 Submerging opens at the Exhibit Space at La Tienda at
7 Caliente Road
  in El Dorado on February 18th and continues through March 11. Opening reception from 5-7. The five artists represented are: Thayer Carter, Andrew Davis, Geraldine Fiskus, Dee Homans and J. Barry Zeiger. For further information call Dee Homans at 982-0501 or the Exhibit Space at la Tienda at 428-0024.
 
To see a review of the show, click here.
MOTTO:

"Safety in numbers; Art before Alzheimer’s.
STATEMENT:

"Emerging—or Submerging? Emerging is the quality par excellence of our present, a stepping out into the hard glitter of celebrity. In contrast, submerging is a thirst for ambiguity and depth. In any case here are 5 "submerging" artists. Each one has invented a vehicle to probe the depths of the concepts and issues that inspire them. They inspect the hidden wreckage of history; the lost things, the detritus of our lives; the hidden and forgotten beauty of the natural world; the vestigial meaning of language; and the humor and  horror of primordial, vital form."


THE ARTISTS

Thayer Carter works in a variety of media including oil, acrylic, water colors, and woodcuts. His focus is on the earth, on landscape, but also on things seen up close. Assiduously avoiding romance and pasted-on ideas, he submerges himself in what he sees. His paintings place us here, our feet firmly planted.
Out of curiosity or restlessness, Andrew Davis has also experimented in a number of media: the printed page, wood, steel, concrete,  the photographic image, but his subjects have always been the same: the nature of language, the cohabitation of people and objects, above all the relationship of words with things.
In her self portraits Geraldine Fiskus re-invents herself through performance. Sometimes she sees herself during the calm of meditation—the cloud forms above her head symbolize distractions. Earlier portraits reveal uncomfortable, disquieting experience. These facescapes display the raw edge which most of us avoid.

The fiberglass sculptures of Dee Homans suggest, but do not represent, bodies. They are a tangle of shapes wrenching themselves into the form of a tower, or a swarm clinging together in mid-air, or a gust across a wall.  Homans sees her work as tragic-comic: "It is at once prosaic and Baroque, grand and playful, inanimate and alive, apocalyptic and hopeful."

J. Barry Zeiger has developed an object based language. By situating objects he creates contexts for ideas. He groups them into unexpected relationships--merging and submerging their identities to suggest ephemeralness. He notes, "We give such importance to things, while they just keep dissolving."