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Irvine Contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of a three-person exhibition of gallery artists, Time and Materials, featuring mid-career artists, John Gasper, Andrew Lyght, and Soledad Salamé.
Using the traditional artisan's working term "time and materials" as a metaphor for questions in contemporary art forms, this show reveals how three artists working in different genres and media approach the questions of time, process, and the materiality of their medium.
Parallel to the question of artistic process, the works in the show also open up the ongoing question of the viewer's time and position in relation to an art work: these works require our own engagement with records of an artist's process through a prior encoding of time and materials. Time and Materials takes us into several realms--values that transcend materiality, the weight and presence of the physical and built world, and the state of our environment and natural resources. The exhibition opens Friday December 3 and extends through Saturday, January 15.
John Gasper reworks the possibilities of monochromatic, reductive painting by exploring texture and composition through the meticulous application and reapplication of richly pigmented oil and wax to canvas. In this exhibition, Gasper presents a series of three of his new paintings in saturated colors. The new paintings present openings onto emotionally charged spaces punctuated with compositional moments, anchoring the painting and adding additional dimensionality. The viewer becomes captivated by the process layers in Gasper's works, which suggest a transcendence of space and time while relying firmly on the materiality of painting itself, as in the tradition of Still, Rothko, Marden, and Ryman.
John Gasper is a repeated recipient of Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants, and he also exhibits in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Andrew Lyght presents a selection of works from his Rust Series. While at first glance these works show impressions of rusted industrial and found metal objects, they are in fact transfer drawings of oxidizing objects that record time and materiality directly in the medium, heavy-weight Fabriano paper. The rust images are not simply "on" the paper support, but actually embedded in the paper, which has been transformed by water and Lyght's "rusting-in" process. Additional works in the show include Lyght's signature colored penciled line drawings, which combine primitive, modern, and contemporary forms. The penciled work is done free-hand and permits no revision; each line is permanently fixed onto the surface of the paper.
Andrew Lyght recently received the prestigious Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Award in 2004. He was nominated for inclusion in the 2003 Florence Biennale by curator Barbara Rose, and was subsequently awarded the "Lorenzo Il Magnifico" Award for Drawing at the Biennial.
In the Main Gallery, Soledad Salamé exhibits a site specific installation comprised of sheets of poured resin embedded with organic materials. Translucent, the sculptures evoke the geological properties of amber with materials suspended and encapsulated in time. An environmental artist known for her installations and use of organic materials, Salamé also tirelessly experiments with media and materials, using her own mixture of resins, pigments, and traditional media. Also on view are paintings from her "Water Series," which are mixed media compositions that reflect on the state of water on the planet. Composed of her own paint and resin formula, these powerful paintings evoke the motion of waterfalls, rivers, and currents in cascades of layered washes.
Soledad Salamé was born in Chile and lives and works in Baltimore. An environmental artist who works in many types of media, Salamé had a major installation exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile in 2001. She has also received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and has exhibited at El Museo del Barrio and the Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC. Salamé created a site-specific installation for Sculpture in 4 Dimensions at the Art Museum of the Americas in 2004. She is preparing for a major museum exhibition in Chile for 2005.
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