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

This exhibition opens on Thursday, 1 June 2006, with a reception from 6 – 8 PM, and will continue through 8 July 2006. (We will not have a gallery talk for this show.)

d berman gallery is located at 1701 Guadalupe Street, Austin, Texas 78701. Regular gallery hours are Tuesday - Saturday from 11:00 - 6:00. Then on 1 July, our summer hours kick in; in July & August, gallery hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 5.

For more information, please call 512.477.8877 or see www.dbermangallery.com. For high-resolution images and other information to accompany these exhibitions, please see our press website at http://www.dbermangallery.com/presspage-nextshow.htm