As
Austin heats up for summer, so will d berman gallery
(metaphorically, not literally. . . we happily have
a new AC unit!). The gallery will embrace the season
with a hot summer group show, HEAT, including work
by artists Robert Dale Anderson, Cynthia Camlin,
Sandra Fiedorek, Faith Gay, Sarah Greene Reed, Christopher
Schade, and Steve Wiman. The exhibit will include
a little bit of everything under the summer sun:
paintings, drawings, sculpture, and installation.
Robert
Dale Anderson’s work balances on a fine line
between representation and abstraction; each piece
is a compulsively controlled rendering of complete
chaos. Reminiscent of Brueghel or Bosch, the work
depicts fantastic, bizarre worlds in which ambiguous
objects swarm over every inch of their surreal environments;
these miniature universes seem abandoned yet animated.
Intricate lines coil and unwind to reveal the dreamlike
and sometimes nightmarish fantastical worlds of
his imagining.
Cynthia
Camlin uses organic motifs in stylized, patterned
formats, and a luminous and rich tonal range is
an important element in the work. Of her new body
of work, Cynthia Camlin says, “Turning to
landscapes of glaciers and icebergs, my most recent
paintings depict multifaceted crystalline formations
on panels and three-dimensional cubes. Each composition
is built through the incremental accumulation of
small geometric shapes of transparent color, which
add up to spatial trajectories and recessions, opening
up windows into the white gesso. For me, the incremental
and unpredictable process of constructing these
compositions becomes a metaphor for organically
growing forms in nature, where erratic, unprecedented
forms emerge from finite and predictable elements.”
Sandra
Fiedorek says of her sculptural work: “I am
taken with shapes that lead a double life, mechanical
and figural. Many of these pieces begin with the
tracings of found objects, usually mechanical refuse,
or with mechanical representations of the human
figure. The shapes chosen, and the methods and materials
used, are such that the images are construed to
invite but also deny any fixed interpretation. The
pieces are variously happy or mean, innocent or
knowing, benign or malignant, smart or stupid.”
In
her new work, Faith Gay continues to explore themes
of color and pattern. Utilizing plastic beads which
have been arranged in vibrant color configurations
or into Rorschach- like abstractions, Gay then melts
them and pins them to the wall. In addition, her
transparent resin- coated dot- grid works bring
to mind the op art movement popularized in the 60’s.
Sarah
Greene Reed creates digital collages using found
imagery which she manipulates on the computer. “By
gradually layering digital images and manipulating
scale, she creates the illusion of depth on the
otherwise flat surface of the print. The artist
says she approaches her work with a photographic
sensibility, yet she considers the end result to
be not a photograph but a print. I tend to agree.
Although she incorporates photographic images and
works in Photoshop, her final product is undoubtedly
a print for several reasons, primarily because photographic
elements are only one part of the overall process.
Reed does not identify herself as a photographer;
she intends for her works to be prints, not photographs.
The language in which she works is that of printmaking.”
- Marisa C. Sánchez, Artlies
Christopher
Schade’s work resists both representational
and abstract definitions. His narrative work is
alive with vitality. Schade says, “Three ideas
currently interest me in paintings. The first is
creating paintings that never reveal their full
meaning, never end in understanding…another
aspect of life that I want in my work is unpredictability…and
finally, and maybe most importantly, I want my work
to convey the unbridled emotion and intensity of
sensation that is life.”
Steve
Wiman’s installation work “is thoughtful,
meditative, and playful – assembling like
objects in evocative ways, at times in a gentle,
joshing dialogue with the architecture. …
Wiman was inspired by his mother's household collections,
born of Dust Bowl-era deprivations. Everything was
saved: washed and flattened aluminum foil, rubber
bands, strings, or shoelaces turned into balls,
and many other things often transformed by disassembling
them and storing one like thing with another. Wiman
once asked his mother where a box of plastic balls
came from; they were from roll-on deodorant bottles.
Wiman has taken this aesthetic into the studio and
made a life's work of reimagining the most ordinary
things.” – Madeline Irvine, Austin Chronicle
