Group Show Vol. 4

Gildar Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of new nostalgic works by Portland artist Ryan Everson titled Long Lost. Using "re-imagined objects" Everson transports his viewers back to a seemingly simpler and more mysterious existence before the birth of an easily searchable world —a time when a navigation system was an overly wrinkled topographic map and a heart for adventure. However tangible though, Everson's recollections are nonetheless a fantasy. It is this very sense of yearning for something that never truly existed that his work examines.

Coupling retro hand made signage with altered childhood explorer objects and plywood constructions Everson creates a believable past to return to. Using broad terms of longing in his sign pieces like "missing out" and "alone again" the artist taps into a universal sense of loss. Vintage Boy Scout walkie talkies, knapsacks and arrows help lead us deeper into the fog of this fabricated yet familiar memory. Documenting his pieces in environmental settings, Everson further heightens this sense of suspended reality.

Although illusion plays a major role in the sentiment of Everson's work the artist is indebted to his real world artistic predecessors. One can't help but see within Everson's rustic vision images of great American folktales; Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn floating down the Mississippi, Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassidy barreling down a stretch of highway, the Hardy Boy's unearthing a clue. In his use of language Everson finds himself amongst a lineage of fine artists working with the impact of the aphorism such as Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Barbara Krueger and Jenny Holzer, while his carefully handcrafted representations recall the wooden recreations of artists such as Tom Sachs and Lee Stoetzel.

While Everson's work invites audiences to develop their own mythology with it, he cannot deny his own personal desire for the inexplicable: "My life becomes increasingly planned, documented and recounted, and as time passes I become comfortable. Longing for the moments when I was confronted by the expanse of uncertainty, I look for new ways to feel the fear and excitement of being truly lost."

Ryan Everson received his MFA in sculpture from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012 and his BFA in Sculpture from the University of Oregon in 2009. His three dimensional artwork examines emotional states such as fame, fear of the unknown, introspection and sincerity. Often marked by a sense for theatrical melodrama and brooding humor, Everson's art often emits a dark comedic mood. The Artist currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Group Show Vol. 4

Gildar Gallery presents Real is a Feeling, an exhibit featuring mechanical image reproduction as a way of exploring subjective perception. Part of Denver's Month of Photography, this thematic group show was inspired by the song of the same name by artist / musician / provocateur Travis Egedy aka Pictureplane. This group show consists of a selection of works all immersed in the manipulation, questioning and fabrication of the real.

Perspective wobbles between the simulated and the sincere as authentic copies, altered documentation and artifacts of both convincing and suspect origin encounter each other. Internal themes emerge amongst these objects in dialog — surface, beauty, authorship and the spiritual interact through an underlying sense of play. In this multifaceted display of work the realness of the medium itself comes under scrutiny as traditional photography, digital appropriation and even sculptural duplication become intertwined.

The very advent of symbols at the dawn of human civilization began an ongoing dialog with re-presented versions of events, emotions and ideas. This lead the father of western philosophy, Plato, eventually to question people's ability to see beyond their own illusions. While not a new notion, artists of every era inevitably engage with the inescapable bias of perspective. Contributing their own unique filters using the means available within their time, these artists perpetually expand and compound this ongoing paradox of the human attempt to communicate truth. Real is a Feeling furthers this historical conversation with its own highly subjective selection of poignant contemporary voices.

Gildar Gallery presents two concurrent exhibitions by Maryland based artists Sidney Pink and Bill Dunlap. Both artists create representational works on spare backdrops to very different effect.

New Works By Sidney Pink

Sidney Pink (born 1979) is an American artist who creates watercolor and graphite drawings. Pink lived and worked in Japan for four years where he found inspiration for his art. He has exhibited in New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, L.A., Berlin, and Tokyo and was nominated for a Jury Prize at Takashi Murakami's art festival, 'GEISAI Museum 2.' In a review of Pink's work, Japanzine magazine described Pink as, "one of Japan's most inspirational gaijin [foreign] artists." His work has been featured in various publications including Fine Line Magazine, Japan's Artcollector, and the New York Times Magazine. Pink has a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He now lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland 

The spacious graphite and watercolor drawings of Sidney Pink offer a world of possibilities at the early moments of conception. Not yet grounded in location, a host of often repeating and archetypal characters populate a blank void. Inspired by the artist's time spent living in Japan, this emerging narrative and its figures present an outsider's perhaps impossible yet necessary attempt to accurately internalize and transmit a foreign culture.

Lacking the ability to speak the language and fully engage with the environment in which he found himself, Pink spent much of his four years living in Ebina, Kanagawa Prefecture as an observer. Surrounded by the people and symbols of a landscape, yet isolated by an implacable communication barrier, he began depicting his own imagined narrative based on the visual elements he regularly encountered, including the pervasive aesthetics of Japanese pop culture including anime and manga. Pink developed an illustrated reality that taps into the subtle humor of a perceived national psyche in which the mundane and the absurd live side by side.

Even floating in an empty vacuum, iconic imagery found in Pink's work, such as the school girl and the salary man suit, firmly place the work within the particularities of the Japanese cultural context. Here the value of technological progress and productivity meet with more esoteric traditions and fantastic myths. As the body of work continues to grow so do the narrative components as more characters and graphic elements connecting them are introduced. However, rather than preplanning a discernible plot or arch, Pink sees the story he is creating as a more discursive path emerging in the moments of creation:

"I feel like there might be a bigger puzzle that I'm trying to figure out and once I figure it out, if it's even possible, then I'll be done – Not that I believe I'll ever get there. There's certainly a narrative, but I don't necessarily have all of the details. For me I do the illustration as a way of finding that narrative."

This series of work itself seemed to the artist to have appeared in a sudden burst without forethought. After three years in Japan without any significant artistic output, one evening Pink suddenly found himself compelled to begin drawing and in a matter of a few days a stack of paper appeared containing the first characters from this new world. He has continued in this vein and has been following a compulsion to discover the next developments in this expanding universe ever since.

One cannot separate the artist's process from the content of the work and in Pink's case this is all too true. For each of his drawings, Pink uses himself as a model. With the artist posing as all of his characters in full costume, from school girl to astronaut, Pink's drawings become more than visionary fiction, they begin to take on the role of a collective self portrait. In this way the artist as foreigner not only appropriates what he has witnessed for re-interpretation, but in fact absorbs his blended world of observations and imagination, making it for him at least, very real.

Paintings by Bill Dunlap

In the project gallery Bill Dunlap presents a series of his emotionally raw mixed media portraits. He has has acquired a national following in the lowbrow art community and has exhibited his iconic paintings across the US, gaining recognition for a variety of work. This series displays the artist's interest in the visceral side of human existence.

Immediately a connection to the turbulent works of the great British painter Francis Bacon is apparent in Dunlap's contorted forms. And like his grotesque predecessor, Dunlap began his career as a painter late at the age of 37. However, wholly his own both in technique and subject matter, Dunlap's portraits use gestural acrylic and spray paint techniques and have begun to examine clearly American themes.

For example, his most recent work in the exhibit titled Portrait of a Racist derives from the artist's interest in 18th century Colonial portraiture by artists like John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart. A bitter irony within these historical works and their subjects captivated Dunlap; these heroic champions of liberty immortalized with painstaking likenesses, also had monstrous qualities, most notably their participation in the great atrocity of human slavery. Splicing the iconic swastika tattoo on the forehead of infamous and charismatic 20th century sociopath, Charles Manson, with the refined pose of James Madison, Dunlap began abstracting the face until it no longer resembled any particular individual but contained the essence of this conflicted sentiment.

Rising out of darkness Dunlap's images combine the raw energy of expressive abstraction, with the recognizable form of the human head. Describing these works as macabre would be an understatement. When asked about his preoccupation with violence Dunlap responded with a succinct worldview, "Everything we call progress is violence against someone or something that stood before it. I'm interested in seeing these disasters. I dissect in order to reveal."

Gildar Gallery presents a special exhibition of naturalist sentiment by artist Emi Brady. Titled Swarm, this exhibit will be the first of its kind at the gallery in which a large scale installation will engulf the entire main room with individual available works on display in the project gallery. This will be Brady's first exhibition in Denver after having showed regularly in New York following her studies in printmaking at the School of Museum of Fine Arts and Pratt Institute where she received her MFA.

Employing the oldest of printmaking processes, the relief cut, Emi Brady literally extracts this media beyond its historically flat surface to create immersive three dimensional environments. Raised amidst the pervasive hunting culture of the American Southeast, Brady's swirling installations of birds and other creatures gathered en masse recall the artist's early fascinations with both animal anatomy and the relationship between human and animal behavior as social organisms.

Often returning to her initial backyard observations and fantasies growing up in Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama, Brady depicts various species of fowl and other fauna indigenous to those regions amassed in great flocks. The denseness of bodies contained within these larger forms lends to both sensations of chaos and coordination as individual identification is lost while the swarm begins to take on its own shape and intelligence. These creatures gathered in overwhelming numbers and unexpected variety beg the question: for what purpose? Perhaps a certain unity in necessity — a forced migration due to a sudden environmental shift, or perhaps these animals. like people, share some inexplicable underlying pull to form a collective social unit despite their differences. As Brady notes:

"The phenomenon of swarm behavior is eloquently expressed in flocks of birds. At a distance we observe how a flock moves as a singular unit while subtle turns of individuals can reverberate and create drastic changes. Within the human flock we are bound to social and cultural movement while maintaining sensitivity to our individual experience. This is both humbling and frustrating, existing as an insignificant element of a whole while being trapped within an individual awareness."

More About the Artist

In Emi Brady's work the influence of both scientific observation and graphic representation emerges. Using art as a means for investigating phenomena in animal biology places Brady in the company of predecessors like the great ornithological explorer and illustrator John James Audubon as well as contemporary art luminaries such as Cui Guo Cian, Kate MccGwire and Walton Ford. As a printmaker, Brady's interest in pushing printmaking beyond its traditionally two dimensional format aligns her with other contemporary artists such as Dennis McNett, under whom she worked as a studio assistant, and fellow Pratt Institute alumni, Swoon. Brady's work has been exhibited throughout New York and has been featured on the Third Ward Blog and the forthcoming book "500 Paper Objects."

Gildar Gallery presents an exhibition of all new works on paper by Pattie Lee Becker. Recognized for her ability to extract psychological space into tangible form, her latest series titled Powers of Ten literally magnifies her established internal universe to entirely new degrees. Inspired by the eponymous Charles and Ray Eames film, this series of drawings presents a fantastic and highly personal internalization of the notion of worlds within worlds.

When released in 1977 the Eames' "Powers of Ten" wowed audiences by beautifully and systematically visualizing how by widening our field of view, the context of our reality can be radically transformed. With the film's frame zooming out from an afternoon picnic in the park by magnitudes of ten, audiences were jettisoned out into the far reaches of the cosmos and then quickly transported back in to examine the very smallest building blocks of that same reality.

In Pattie Lee Becker's Powers of Ten drawings she takes this principle of scalable reality and applies it inward. Within the mind however, empiricism gives way to a highly subjective and personal logic. Becker applies her own rules of magnification to her established taxonomies to reveal their highly cyclical relationships. With her previous works identifying the artist's individually separate worlds of materials, structures and flora and fauna, Becker's ten drawings in this series now place these surrealities in perspective to each other. Layered in space with fittingly inverted perspective, objects appear to grow larger rather than smaller as they recede into the distance of these detailed mind-scapes. Like perpetually turning a kaleidoscope to watch repeating elements shift in magnitude and relation to each other, it is unclear and perhaps unnecessary to understand exactly one's own orientation in Becker's fascinating universe.

About the Artist

The alternatively vibrant and moody work of Pattie Lee Becker unfolds as a vague subconscious world of unexpected proportions. Through drawing, printmaking and sculpture, familiar and foreign forms arise in hauntingly playful relationships. Raised in the great Midwest, Pattie Lee Becker spent her childhood surrounded by prairie and open sky before relocating to the East Coast to attend the Rhode Island School of Design. After graduating she attend attended Columbia University's School of the Arts where she received her MFA. Becker has been awarded numerous residencies and fellowships and has taught as a professor at the University of Colorado, Naropa University and the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.

Gildar Gallery presents two exhibitions of works on paper by talented artists Max Kauffman and Tom Mazzullo. Both artists share an interest in the human necessity to infuse symbols with meaning. However, from there both artist's diverge greatly in their approach to engaging this phenomenon.
 

In the main gallery Max Kauffman returns with an exhibition of all new watercolor and ink drawings marking an evolution in his sought after style. Exhibiting his works across North America, Kauffman has gained a following for his ethereal floating worlds. Exploring the role of narrative as a vessel for creating meaning from the often perplexing array of unrelated experiences people encounter everyday, in this exhibition titled The Reptilian Brain in Autumn, Kauffman's mystical reality, governed by its own array of symbols and myths, has taken on a muted and anthropological tone. The whimsy of the past meets with a sobering palette as unstable visions form. An omnipresent fog invites viewers to peer through and devise their own reality as buildings and beings appear caught in moments of uncertainty.

On display in the project gallery, Tom Mazzullo's extruded letters present symbols out of context. An expert of the medieval drawing practice of silverpoint, in this series titled Incantations, Mazzullo pulls on a historical medium to create sleek, minimal explorations of semiotic relationships. In conversation with painters such as Ed Ruscha and Wayne White and the concrete poetry of John Cage, Mazzullo renders three dimensional typography outside of its place within traditional visual language

Gildar Gallery presents Alkahest an exhibition of all new paintings by Jonathan Saiz. His latest series of richly executed oil paintings explores man's desire for transcendence through the material world. The title of the series refers to a universal solvent once sought by Alchemists, which if found promised wealth to its discovered, while jeopardizing the existence of the physical world. In keeping with this paradoxical legend, Saiz conjures beautifully translucent geometric forms as unstable containers for an extravagant array of, "curiously shifting histories". These fragmented visions appear always on the brink of breaking beyond the bounds of their crystalline chambers, at once becoming attainable and at risk of dissolving in an instant.
 

In the Project Gallery, Johanna Mueller showcases her new series of totemic works tilted New Icons. Including one of a kind, hand colored and gold leafed engravings as well as mixed media painting, this body of reverent objects displays the artist's interest in the use of animalistic symbolism as a means for processing human experience. Combining iconographies across time and geography, from Zuni Fetishes to Hindu Mandalas and Celtic Lore, Mueller envisions a modern bestiary wholly her own.

In this two person showcase, the displaced human form takes the foreground as the body and head rarely meet. Evan Isoline, who works with masterful printmaking methods and mixed media, fragments the human body from the neck down in order to understand its role as a symbol for larger societal values. Conversely from within the confines of a hospital room, Steven Prochyra utilizes the immediacy of graphite to isolates the faces of those looking in, re-contextualizing the intimate and distant relationships that exist between patient and caregiver, observed and the observer.