Camille Obering Fine Art

Jackson Hole, WY – July 10, 2024 – Camille Obering Fine Art is pleased to present “Forms of Origins” an exhibition of new work by Tetonia, Idaho and Catalonia, Spain based artist Natalie Clark.  On view by appointment from July 19, 2024 – February 2, 2024.  An opening celebration will take place on Friday, July 19, 2024 from 5:30 – 7:30 pm. 

For over 40 years Natalie Clark has pursued an investigation of the symbiosis between materials, form, nature, spirituality, and indigenous cultures of the world.  In her most recent works, Clark has embarked upon an internal journey exploring sacred geometry, genesis, and transformation through the prism of feminine energy. “Forms of Origins” is the result of a two-and-a-half-year pursuit beginning with Clark personally selecting blocks of marble from a quarry in Carrara, Italy.  At her studio in a 13th century masia tucked away in the Catalonian hills, she breathed life and fluidity into the solid, crystalline structure of marble, a material historically considered too difficult for women to work with because of the manual labor and finesse required to manipulate this stone.  In addition, working directly with the Parellada Foundry – known for working with Joan Miro – Clark cast bronzes from these sculptures which exhibit a remarkable fluidity, with sinuous, flowing lines that capture movement and vitality. 

Through these works, Clark honors the feminine divine, connecting with nature, abundance, sensuality, inspiration and peace.  Dissatisfied with prevailing contemporary definitions of womanhood as either meek and insignificant or strident and harsh, Clark turned to the essence of her soul and to women around her, marveling at the power of woman’s innate ability to create a lush and nurturing garden from which creativity, relationships, family, peace and happiness could grow.  Historically, these attributes have been venerated in cultures around the world seen in the naming of various deities.  Clark’s sculptures take on the names of goddesses such as “Kali,” Hindu for mother of the universe whose floral form reveals a universal language into the feminine divine, fragile and delicate, yet powerful.  “Anjea” the Australian fertility goddess, thought to house  people's souls between their incarnation.  Hindu, light of the universe, “Atmika” radiates light and a profound universality, her form transcends many spiritual faiths, residing in the Divine. “Vesta,” Roman goddess guardian of the sacred flame, wicks upwards and outwards in a familiar rhythm retaining a core thread and the essence of sacred geometry. And Greek goddess “Gaia” is the personification of the earth and the culmination of feminine energy, abundance and fertility.

Contemporary society is witnessing a changing tide where women are embracing their feminine energy through this prism, making Clark’s work from “Forms of Origins” both prescient and timeless.   Clark’s mastery in forming marble and bronze positions herself within the grand legacy of art history, continuing and renewing the dialogue between classical craftsmanship and modern artistic expression. In doing so, she follows in the footsteps of pioneering women artists like Camille Claudel, Barbara Hepworth, and Louise Bourgeois, who have looked at these historically patriarchal practices and reinterpreted them from a female perspective.

Natalie Clark, is a classically trained sculptor, whose oeuvre includes large-scale sculpture in a variety of media, including marble, steel, ceramic, snow, and other natural materials.  She grew up in Hertfordshire England, close to Henry Moore’s studio.  She received a degree in Fine Arts, specializing in sculpture from the University of Brighton in England.  There she studied with Antony Gormley and Phyllida Barlow and was classmates with Rachel Whiteread before going to the United States where she received a full ride grant to pursue a Masters in Fine Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago.  She assisted sculptors Milton Horn and Martin Puryear while in Chicago. Clark continued her education as Industrial Artist in Residence at the Kohler factory in Wisconsin and she has taught at universities in Texas and Wyoming.

In addition to shows in the U.S. and the U.K., she has also exhibited in Mexico, Canada, Japan, Spain, Egypt, United Arab Emirates and South Africa.  Natalie Clark was selected as one of twelve internationally renowned sculptors to create a large-scale work to be presented on the Giza Plateau in front of the Pyramids in Egypt at Art D'Égypte’s Forever Is Now Exhibition. It is an important global event held under the auspices of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Patronage of UNESCO.  Made of Corten steel and Carrara marble, “The Spirit of Hathor” honors the Divine Feminine and Women’s Empowerment with a modern representation of the Egyptian Goddess Hathor, the matriarchal mistress of the sky.  The piece later traveled to Dubai to be exhibited. “Spirit of Hathor” now resides at the prestigious collection of Smith Haute Lafitte in Bordeaux, France.

Guesthouse is a private studio space in Jackson Hole, WY, that invites artists, musicians, filmmakers, and creators to explore new ideas, and present their work to new audiences. The space is run by art advisor and curator Camille Obering, and musician and composer Ben Musser.

Jackson Hole, WY – January 30, 2024 – Camille Obering Fine Art is pleased to present “Midwinter Light” an exhibition of new and existing work by Brooklyn based artist Alyson Shotz. On view by appointment from February 7 – July 14, 2024. An opening celebration will take place on February 16, 2024.

Known for artwork that explores the phenomenological experience of space, gravity, light, and matter, Shotz is returning to Jackson Hole for the first time since living here on and off from 1982-1987 while studying geology and fine art as a college student. She cites the years in Wyoming as formative in her practice, allowing slow and close observation of the natural world, contemplation of the unique light on the mountains and in the valley, and the physical presence of an immense open sky as fundamental to the development of her work. The works in “Midwinter Light” continue Shotz’s longtime exploration of light and time through cyanotype, metal, and relief works on wood panel.

Created outside in January during a MacDowell Fellowship in New Hampshire, Shotz’s cyanotypes capture the ethereal and ephemeral nature of light. Translucent sculptures were fabricated for this process, and placed directly onto hand brushed, chemically treated paper. The sun was very low in the sky, and the air was often filled with light crystalline snow. Each day Shotz would coat the paper, place the sculptures, and expose the images to sunlight in various densities: abundant sun in the morning, less in the late afternoon. Each time of day required its specific quantity of light. After exposure and rinsing in icy water, the sunlight revealed mysterious images that contained an impression of the light that had been materially embedded into the paper that day. These works are being publicly shown for the first time.

The copper nail and bicycle tire works on wood panel were made during the COVID pandemic isolation. Slow and deliberate, repetitive hammering was a response to the moment: a way of marking time, meditating on loss, and yet still reflecting light. To convey an idea of compressed time in sculptural form, Shotz discovered a material metaphor in the discarded bicycle inner tubes that contain, in their physical history, distance traveled through time. The folding and pleating of the tires onto the surface of each panel was a method of increasing the number of hours each panel could contain. Sunlight reflecting off the copper washers contrasts the dense black time of the tubes. Light is essentially weightless, but it has time embedded in it as well- for instance, the ethereal light from our sun is the result of 4.5 billion years of creation. The works are both jewel like and industrial.

Constellation #1 is the first piece out of a new body of work created for the Guesthouse show. The sculpture evokes a grouping of heavenly bodies/ drops of water refracting sunlight/a crystalline structure/a wave function/a probability cloud/ an electro/chromo/biological process that creatures use to communicate and camouflage. All of these are constructs found in nature, at once familiar and extraordinary. The protean color of this sculpture occurs as a result of the electromagnetic process itself - electricity as color.

Alyson Shotz is known for large scale sculptures that subvert their own physicality in order to explore the phenomenological experience of space, gravity, light and matter. Her work is included in numerous public collections, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Guggenheim Bilbao, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, The High Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Phillips Collection, The DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, The San Jose Museum of Art, Storm King Art Center, and The Yale University Art Gallery, among others.

Recent projects have included: Entanglement a permanent commissioned sculpture at the Billie Tisch Center for Integrated Sciences, Skidmore College; The Robes of Justitia a GSA permanent mosaic inside the dome of the Fred D. Thompson Federal courthouse, Nashville, TN; Temporal Shift at Grace Farms Foundation in CT. She has also been included in exhibitions such as Line of Wit at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, The More Things Change, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art and Space at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Contemplating the Void and The Shapes of Space, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Light and Landscape at Storm King Art Center, Living Color, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC and Taking Space: Women Artists and the Politics of Scale at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia. She has had solo exhibitions at the The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, The MSU Broad Art Museum, The Weatherspoon Museum, The Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, and Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, among others. Shotz was the Anne Stark Locher and Kurt Locher MacDowell Fellow in 2022, she received The GSA Honor Award: Highest Achievement in Art 2022 for The Robes of Justitia, she was an Arts Institute Research Fellow at Stanford University in 2014- 2015, a Sterling Visiting Scholar, Stanford University, 2012, she received a Pollock Krasner Award in 1999 and 2010, the Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship in 2007, and was the 2005-2006 Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence at Yale University Art Gallery.

Guesthouse is a private studio space in Jackson Hole, WY, which invites artists, musicians, filmmakers, and creators to explore new ideas, and present their work to new audiences. The space is run by art advisor and curator Camille Obering, and musician and composer Ben Musser.

Jackson Hole, WY – August 1, 2023 – Camille Obering Fine Art is pleased to present “A Cleft of Light” an exhibition of new paintings by New Orleans - based artist Mallory Page. The new body of work explores the divide between the physiological and the psychological, specifically the moment of clarity and consciousness which subtly reveals itself between these two spaces. Page references the line “a cleft of light” from Adrienne Rich's poem, “XXI Love Poems" to unveil these sentiments in her ethereal paintings. The artist will be present at the opening August 4, 2023, and “A Cleft of Light” is on view by appointment until January 28, 2024.

Over the last few years, Page has made a discourse between the physiological and psychological, while beginning to observe a psychic impulse in her work. It begins in these paintings at the time of day when there is one last sliver of multi-colored light left in the sky, though already dark outside. Enamored with the subdued rainbow phenomena, its brevity, and how the earth uses light to mark a transition, this work responds to an urgency for magic as an individual and part of collective consciousness. It attempts to animate light and entangle it with how we receive and respond to visceral emotions.

In representing the atmospheric presence of the psyche, these environment-creating scaled works are composed of thin layers of acrylic washes. Light is spatially considered in two ways: as backgrounds meant to pull a viewer in as refuge or as space in the forefront, where they become ghosts or vapors. These shadows are illuminated and therefore exposed. There is a duality to what light forms can be. Page imagines the night as erotic in its silent cloak and also in the way it masquerades as many veils between security and uncertainty, a space we inhabit, day after day. This work uses darkness and light to move between grief and joy. It displays sensitivity and attention to the mundane, which embodies the period of collective mourning we are living in.

Mallory Page (b. 1983) is a New Orleans-based artist whose compositions employ multiple layers and hues of acrylic wash that cascade across large scaled canvas. Her interests lie in the study of the psyche, dreams and the subconscious. She often tethers psychic sensations or observations to build work about creating deeper interactions with the sublime. Page was raised in Lafayette, Louisiana, a region with a vibrant, often mystical, culture and distinctive geographical landscape. She holds a B.I.D. from Louisiana State University and is currently a candidate for a Master’s in Fine Art from The Art Institute of Chicago.

Guesthouse is a private studio space in Jackson Hole, WY, which invites artists, musicians, filmmakers, and creators to explore new ideas, and present their work to new audiences. The space is run by art advisor and curator Camille Obering, and musician and composer Ben Musser.

Jackson Hole, WY – January 29, 2023 – Camille Obering Fine Art is pleased to present “High Stakes” an exhibition of new paintings and a single sculpture by Los Angeles-based artist Marc Horowitz. Starting with references from vintage ski advertisements, 8-bit video games, and 16th century old master works, Horowitz’s layered process unfolds with painterly expressions and printed elements that take over the pictorial surface of his canvases.

In two large paintings titled Corbet’s Cabin and Apres Vous, names borrowed from iconic locations at the famous Jackson Hole Mountain ski resort, a female Renaissance figure gazes outwardly in a sea of colorful and expressive brush strokes. Another work, a cast-aluminum bust that resembles an aging male skier is titled John after John Colter, the early explorer to Jackson Hole. Horowitz brilliantly taps into the unique ethos of mountain and ski culture, marrying vintage and old master iconography with playful video game imagery. The spirit of adventure, divine proximity, playful gamesmanship, and camaraderie are a few of the sentiments Horowitz manifests through these works. In each of these works, viewers are presented with a conceptual divide where humorous pandering meets investigation and the works ask viewers questions about where and how value is created in a work of art.

To quote Horowitz directly “I hoard images, but constantly I gravitate towards the virtuosic works of the old masters. In painting, I improvise with the classics via reproduction and additive mark-making, bridging early-modern and accelerationist post-modern ways of working. It sort of feels like throwing confetti on art history, celebrating and improvising with it simultaneously.”

This clear logic threads through Horowitz’s career where social performance, wild shenanigans, and painting are fixated on the physicality, and the performance of marking an object. These marks often behave like punchlines in jokes where timing and composition are complex and rich in color, both conceptually and visually.

"Unique in his resistance to cynicism and his desire to connect, his work conveys playful irreverence; it is a candid offering activated by self-conscious social poetics." - Artillery

MARC HOROWITZ (b. 1976, Columbus, Ohio) is a Los Angeles-based artist. Horowitz’s innovative social practice is informed by his background in entertainment and advertising. His multifaceted work now encompasses painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Equal parts postmodern and post-internet, Horowitz’s work flattens the hierarchies of culture, politics, relationality, and history creating a diverse but singular visual universe. In addition, Horowitz’s art is informed by his own heritage as a Ukrainian Jew with a debilitating blood disorder. With a touch of humor, most recent paintings and performances bring to light the mental health issues and the instability of life by focusing on intense labor and diagrams that map out the trajectory of generational trauma.

Horowitz received an MFA at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA in 2012. A Creative Time Project Grant Awardee, Horowitz has taught at the University of Southern California, and Otis College, and lectured at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), the Hammer Museum, Stanford University, and Yale. Horowitz has exhibited his work internationally, and past exhibitions include venues such as de boer, Los Angeles, Guesthouse, Jackson Hole, WY; L21, Majorca, Spain; Johannes Vogt, New York, NY; BANK Mab Society, Shanghai, China; Mannerheim Gallery, Paris, France; The Hayward Gallery, London, UK; The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; China Art Objects, Los Angeles, CA; Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT; Galerie Nathalie Halgand, Vienna, Austria; and Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL among others.

Guesthouse is a private studio space in Jackson Hole, WY, which invites artists, musicians, filmmakers, and creators to explore new ideas, and present their work to new audiences. The space is run by art advisor and curator Camille Obering, and musician and composer Ben Musser (Benyaro).

Jackson Hole, WY – July 15, 2022 – Camille Obering Fine Art is pleased to present Julia Bland, “Dream of Falling” an exhibition of large and small scale work on view at Guesthouse, July 15, 2022 – January 23, 2023, by appointment.

I had a dream I was falling. I had a dream I was swimming in a clear lake. The water was clear, the air was clear, the sky was clear, and everything was black. Everything was either warm or cool, or the hard slick rocks, or the universe spinning.

It is the weight of the thread that brings it down in the center from the places I’ve tied it on either side. From the top, another thread falls out toward the corners, bending in soft slopes, or pulled tight like the tip of a spear, a bridge, a mountaintop. The thread is the line and it’s also the page. The woven surface, flat and wide, makes room for the image piercing its order. Up and down the threads push their way across. The disruption binds the surface further, like a life is bound to a dream.

The canvas burns slow from the center. A red circle swells out from the ashes. The emptiness widens. Slow, and fast, it grabs my eyes in its steady current, an ouroboros spinning outward. Layer by layer, the passing of time is marked by the length of the snake, by the size of the emptiness. Dark lines burn the image of time, a pattern of what has vanished.

On my kitchen table it is clear water poured into a clear vase. Everything is one shape together, the water, the vase, the air pressing all around. But what if the vase shatters? The water spills out everywhere until it is just a wet rug. Oh brokenhearted dreamer, even the still water in the still vase evaporates eventually.

– Julia Bland

Julia Bland’s geometric compositions are created through an intuitive and cyclical approach to assembly and dis-assembly. By weaving, cutting, dying, sewing, burning and painting, the surface becomes a visible record of her evolving, multifaceted process. “Making is not really about following a certain process or tradition,” Bland writes, “but about the way all things change.” Images emerge as formal evolutions embedded in the material structure. Trees, bodies, mountains, hands, bridges, and planets come in and out of focus. In the rhythm of making and unmaking, bland develops the structures, symbols, and patterns that bind disparate elements into a whole.

"Your eye can get caught up in an aesthetic treasure hunt, marveling at how many textures, colors, shapes, and processes can comfortably coexist."

- NY Times

Bland (b. 1986) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has had solo exhibitions at Derek Eller Gallery, Helena Anrather, and On Stellar Rays in New York City, and at Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago. She holds a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art. Her forthcoming projects include solo exhibitions at Guesthouse in Jackson Hole and at The Landing Gallery in Los Angeles. She is represented by Derek Eller Gallery in NYC.

Guesthouse is a private studio space in Jackson Hole, WY, which invites artists, musicians, filmmakers and creators to explore new ideas, and present their work to new audiences. The space is run by art advisor and curator Camille Obering, and musician and composer Ben Musser (Benyaro).

Camille Obering Fine Art is pleased to present Martha Tuttle “Geologies” an exhibition of new work on view at Guesthouse, February 16, 2022 – July 10, 2022, by appointment.

Articulated through textile-based paintings composed of hand-spun wool and linens painted with mineral pigments and at times including mineral and metal formations within the compositions, Tuttle’s show “Geologies” asks the viewer to hold an intimate space in our conscience for that which we often consider inanimate and other than human. Stones serve as a guide in this journey.

By utilizing organic materials with which she has been part of the processing, an intimacy is formed between Tuttle’s hand and the composition, which extends to the viewer, in the tactile nature of the artworks. They elicit a calmness through which the observer can take in more subtle details such as imperfections of the wool yarn Tuttle has spun, variations of the natural dye, a stones surface both dull and brilliant, and the juxtaposition of opaque verses translucent. In this, a consciousness and empathy grows for the evolution of process, how things begin, how they end, the journey between, and how they play off of one another. Awareness of space, materiality, and polarity are reinforced with Tuttle’s placement of stones like pink chalcedony and quartz crystal between panels, further beaconing us to notice understated shifts.

Through her work, Tuttle encourages us to honor the subtle space in our conscience that tells us much about our world and ourselves, but which may not be concrete in one’s ability to describe it. This space may lack vocabulary or tangible formation, but sits on the edge of our mind like a dream, it is a window through which profound revelations can come forth. Take for example the delicacy of the changing light against the strength and steadiness of the mountains. Rather than see these in opposition, Tuttle encourages us to think of delicacy and strength in one eco-system, symbiotic life creators. Light reflecting off of varying surfaces producing alpenglow, a glistening field of faceted snow spread below a rugged wall of rock, or sunlight struggling to come through a mist laden valley, all conjure emotional responses. In these unique and fleeting moments of beauty and stillness, one can feel the edges of ego dissipate, and a unity becomes possible between one’s own matter and that of the surrounding world. The mountains and the minerals have their own timeline, their own passage into dust, their own impact, just as humanity or each individual has its own timeline, evolution and passage. This shared passage, whether it is on a human or a universal scale is communal, and awareness of it can be what grows a sense of profound interconnectivity of the human experience within the natural world.

Martha Tuttle (b. 1989, Santa Fe, NM) is an artist working between painting, textile, and sculpture. She is interested in the intimacies and discourses possible between entities of varying scales and time frames, such as the human and the mineral, or the pebble and the interplanetary. She received her BA from Bard College in 2011, and her MFA from The Yale School of Art in 2015. Fellowships and residencies have included The Rauschenberg Foundation, The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, The Montello Foundation, A-Z West and The Ucross Foundation. Research grants include from the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and a Josef Albers Travelling Grant. Her work has been shown throughout the U.S. and internationally, and has been written about in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, BOMB, and The Brooklyn Rail among others. She is based in Brooklyn, NY.

Guesthouse is a private studio space in Jackson Hole, WY, which invites artists, musicians, filmmakers and creators to explore new ideas, and present their work to new audiences. The space is run by art advisor and curator Camille Obering, and musician and composer Ben Musser (Benyaro).

Jackson Hole, WY – July 8, 2021 – Camille Obering Fine Art is pleased to present Matthew Day Jackson's show, "Waterfalls and Birds" an exhibition of works addressing the mythology of the West, on view at Guesthouse July 8, 2021 – January 23, 2022, by appointment.

Jackson's art grapples with big ideas such as the evolution of human thought, the fatal attraction of the frontier and the faith that man places in technological advancement. Frequently monumental, his work imposes not only on a large physical scale, but also conceptually, occupying an intellectual terrain that reaches from ancient history to outer space exploration.

"Waterfalls and Birds" comprises two new paintings and the artist's most ambitious etchings to date. The paintings are based on Albert Bierstadt's "Yellowstone Falls" and Thomas Moran's "Tower Falls" which are some of the most famous images painted of Yellowstone National Park. These paintings of Yellowstone are fundamental to how we think of beauty, aspects of property ownership and romantic ideas that revolve around land and nation. For example, Moran’s act of painting “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” and sending it to Congress to convince the government that this land should not be owned by one person but should be protected and democratized so that all people could enjoy and experience its tremendous beauty, was a progressive idea. This pioneering act was the catalyst for the United States and then the World, to recognize and protect landscapes and historically important architecture through UNESCO's designation of World Heritage Sites. Bierstadt’s paintings beckoned American immigrants Westward on the promise of spectacular landscapes and vast tracks of land. John James Audubon “singlehandedly” showed European scientists (along with Lewis and Clark) that the abundance of animals living in United States was of great importance. However, this only tells part of the story.

These artists painted a version of the world they wanted others to see. Was it truth? Partly. Was it a mechanism to frame a history they wanted to memorialize? Yes. Art has always been a way to possess, and it is less about what is pictured than what is not. What has been left out – the footprints, fences, military trenches, deeds, treaties, lots of blood, a handshake…. the infinite ways of transferring and demarcating ownership. The lack of human presence, or indigenous names of either land or animal presented the place and its inhabitants as being ownerless. We know this not to be true. Historically, as in present day, media has been used to reframe truth.

Jackson embraces his role as creator and storyteller through his art making, employing both old practices and new technologies to create works layered with ideas and meaning. For example, through his work "There Will Come Soft Rains" Jackson has masterfully orchestrated a portfolio between three American artists (Audubon, Jackson, and Sara Teasdale) from different eras using iconic images of the past to address contemporary issues of today. Each image is a reworking of four engraved copper plates from a failed attempt in the 1930's to recreate Audubon's "Elephant Folio" of the "Birds of North America" at half scale. Using iconic symbols of conservation, each Audubon bird sits in front of an apocalyptic event from history. Pulitzer Prize winning poet Sara Teasdale’s words from her poem “There Will Come Soft Rains” weave through the work further engaging our senses to absorb its meaning. Institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s inclusion of this piece in their collection validates this tour de force in contemporary printmaking, unrivalled in its economy and skill, let alone the historical significance.

The paintings were made in Jackson’s studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn in the spring of 2021. Utilizing contemporary technology, Jackson drew the works in a CAD program, then scrap materials were shredded and broken and then laser cut to perfectly fit into one another. The paintings were assembled to create a bas-relief and then painted white. Once the paintings were painted white, they were then sprayed with Yellow, Magenta, Cyan and Black and etched to create interwoven dot patterns to photomechanically reproduce images of the original paintings by Moran and Bierstadt. Utilizing the common place technique of four-color printing found in many contemporary homes, Jackson leaves the machine to decide what colors we might see, removing human input from the final product. Through these pieces, Jackson shows his favorite place - the greater Yellowstone ecosystem - through a strange reflection of itself.

Matthew Day Jackson is an American artist whose multifaceted practice encompasses sculpture, painting, collage, photography, drawing, video, performance and installation. Born in Panorama City, California, in 1974 and he currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Jackson is represented by Hauser and Wirth and Grimm Gallery. Jackson’s work is included in many private and public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York, NY (US), Astrup-Fearnley Museum, Oslo (NO); Whitney Museum for American Art, New York, NY (US); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL); François Pinault Collection, Paris (FR); Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna (IT); Zabludowicz Collection, London (UK); Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX (US); Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL) and High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (US); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (NL) and Qiao Zhibing Collection, Shanghai (CN). When not in Brooklyn, Jackson and his family can be found skiing, hiking, biking and generally soaking up the beauty of Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Guesthouse is a private studio space in Jackson Hole, WY, which invites artists, musicians, filmmakers and creators to explore new ideas, and present their work to new audiences. The space is run by art advisor and curator Camille Obering, and multi-instrumentalist and composer Ben Musser (Benyaro).

Jackson Hole, WY – December 22, 2020 – Camille Obering Fine Art is pleased to announce the presentation of Ati Maier’s “SpaceRider” Cycle films, and an exhibition of new drawings, opening at Guesthouse, January 23, 2021 5:00pm. In addition, “The Hole” (2021), filmed in Jackson Hole during the 2017 solar eclipse, will be presented as documentation to the SpaceRider performance included in the exhibition “Observatories.” A retrospective hardbound catalog will accompany the drawings and films serving as a primer to the expanded cosmology found in Maier's newest works. “SpaceRider” is on view through June 27th, 2021 by appointment.

Ati Maier’s “SpaceRider” speaks to humanity’s insatiable desire to pioneer and explore. In the “SpaceRider” Cycle, Maier conjures a kind of mythical world, replete with autobiographical elements and scientific (as well science fiction) references. The protagonist is the artist’s alter-ego, an alien-like figure riding a live horse, both wearing what appear to be space helmets. The greater significance lies not so much in institutional culture, or even personal narrative, but rather in the social discourse, which the films engender. Simply put: they deal with everything from metaphysics to community to cultural identity to memory and its effect on our perception of time. These ideas have particular relevance as we find ourselves on the cusp of private space exploration exploding in the near future. The SpaceRider allows us to examine our exploration on planet Earth, our history, discoveries made, colonization, man's accomplishments and failures, and the natural world from which we sustain ourselves. References to the Apollo 11 moon landing and symbolic gestures of planting a flag to mark territory weave through the SpaceRider various voyages.  The films are set in Wyoming, New York City, South Dakota, and Berlin. Maier wrote, directed and performed in all films as the SpaceRider.

Ati Maier’s SpaceRider drawings, layer deeply saturated pigments to bring forth sumptuous caricatures of the SpaceRider’s ventures across earth. They firmly put the SpaceRider into the category of modern day super hero, the likes of which we read about in comic books. However the SpaceRider’s super power is to put a mirror up to our experience quietly insisting through observation, that humanity reflects on its accomplishments, failures and the natural world.

Ati Maier: “With the idea of the SpaceRider I finally found a way to combine my art practice with my passion of horses—each essential to my life since childhood. The SpaceRider has the power and ability to travel through space—her intergalactic journey is made on horseback. By now she has become a permanent fixture of my life and art where we travel between the artistic world of my mind and the material world we each inhabit and share.”

SpaceRider 1 – “ The Map Is Not The Territory”, 2013

Filmed at the Badlands outside Worland and the Red Desert in Wyoming, the SpaceRider follows the Line of the Apollo 11 first ever Moonwalk on two different uninhabited planets and plants her own flag, a symbolic gesture marking title and claiming said place. Man's desire to explore, occupy, organize and mark proprietorship through mapping is only recognized by fellow explorers who recognize and respect this system of authority. However for other explorers "The Map is Not The Territory".

SpaceRider 2 – “ The Placeless Place”, 2016

Filmed at locations in New York City, the SpaceRider enters Times Square as a solitary stranger riding into town. What she encounters is not really a place at all - hence the film’s title – but rather an information packed zone full of pervasive advertisements, invasive electronic signs and teeming images. She plants her Flag, which is indicative of her cosmos, in a subway grate, instantly recalling the planting of the American flag on the moon.

SpaceRider 3 – “ Prophecy Of The Encounter “, 2019

Filmed at locations on the Pine Ridge Reservation in SD, the SpaceRider transcends to earth through a solar eclipse to encounter the Lakota Horse Nation. The plot is taken from a Lakota prophecy, in which a star is approaching close to earth. Parts of the prophecy are told by Charley O NewHoly: “The film plays into the future and the SpaceRider comes and there is nothing left except old people and young children…they learn how to reconnect to the earth and …how to bring the horses back into their lives.”

The Prophecy of the Encounter recalls the meeting between Europeans and Native Americans, however the SpaceRider comes and leaves in peace, a stark contrast from what bore out in American history. As humanity reaches further into the universe, will our encounters be peaceful or will blood be shed for territory. The SpaceRider teaches us that a higher level of being can be achieved through curiosity, empathy, respect, and love.

SpaceRider 4 – “The Nearest Faraway Place “, 2020

Filmed at locations in Berlin, Germany, the SpaceRider follows the line of the former Berlin Wall, starting at the Potzdamer Platz, passing the Brandenburg Gate, the 1936 Olympic Stadium and ends up on the “Teufelsberg”, at the former American espionage center. The shape of the dome matches the helmet the SpaceRider wears - a world within a larger world - and in that way, it is not a piece of interstellar travel gear, but a mirror.

Ati Maier’s latest film, “The Hole” (2021) premiered at the opening accompanied by a performance from Benyaro. Filmed at locations in Jackson Hole, WY, during the Solar Eclipse and the “Observatories” Exhibition at the Center for the Arts in 2017. The SpaceRider traverses along the back roads of Jackson Hole to arrive at the Center for the Arts to claim her Flag. She then rides to the Rodeo Fairgrounds and performs: “Tracing the Line of the First Moonwalk ”, which was also part of the “Observatories” Exhibition.

Ati Maier is a multidisciplinary artist. Her practice includes drawing, painting, photography, 3-D video animation, installation, performance and live action films. Maier was born in Munich, Germany in 1962 and has studied, lived and worked in Vienna, Berlin and New York City. Maier’s 3D video animation was included in the Fokus Bienial in Lódz. Her paintings are part of the permanent collections at the MOMA and the Museum der bildenden Kuenste Leipzig, amongst others. Maier's work has been featured in exhibitions at the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, at the Whitney Museum, (NYC) and at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, NM. She is based in Brooklyn, NY and Santa Fe, NM. www.atimaier.com

Guesthouse is a private studio space in Jackson Hole, WY, which invites artists, musicians and creators, to explore and present new ideas. The space is run by art advisor and curator Camille Obering, and Ben Musser (Benyaro), a multi-instrumentalist and composer. In addition, Obering is part of the curatorial group Peradam Capital.

Jackson Hole, WY – June 24th, 2020 – Camille Obering Fine Art is pleased to announce “Somewhere Anywhere”, an exhibition of a collection of works by native Venetian and New York based artist Maurizio Pellegrin. On view at Guesthouse June 24th – through January 10, 2021 by appointment.

Where is the subtle space of the mind, or that area surrounded by a spiritual veil, or that sense of natural belonging in the natural phenomena? Where is the hidden energy between the surfaces of the objects, that exoteric power of memories and old functions translated into a new encounter of life?

All of this is “Somewhere Anywhere”, and the constant miracle of the things is always repeating itself. In eight works, created at different times and with different materials, the sound of the objects creates fragments of poetical messages. They are not tales, they do not represent people or places, they are a presence of cultures and moments, capsules in history without segmented temporal arches.

In this infinite grace of elements, emerges a metaphysical aspect, where the suspended time takes the viewer by hand in a world of contemplation and silence, in a meditative aspect of life, without noises but always strongly announcing itself through few colors and symbols.

A sense of distance emerges through the stratification of memories, favoring a dimension of silence and absence, always dearest to Pellegrin, that for vocation and destiny has a solitary path. In this condition without a sense of real-time, the numbers printed in the works qualify and quantify the energy contained in the objects and in their dynamic. The light is absorbed and sent back with grace and harmony and space is organized through asymmetry, as a distinctive formal sign of Maurizio’s work. Touches of an interior world rich in a poetical sense move through the composition in an esoteric world, at least for an elusive moment.

“Pellegrin has always been interested in the way objects transmit energy and how the memory of their use endures. He sees objects as the testimony of human life and artifacts of memory, as well as the remains of life after death.

He ascribes meaning to his work based on the science of Numerology, or the study of numbers and their influence on human life based on their symbolic and arithmetic values.

His installations deal with the concept of space– both physically and philosophically– becoming universes organized by symbols and metaphors. The arrangements of objects and materials develop a new hierarchy in which their previous functions are drastically changed. Step by step, the capacity of communication and the inner power of the different elements (often wrapped by the artist to contain the energy) establish a new world of relations. Colors, which are always few, are then chosen for specific philosophical implications and psychological effects.”

“Maurizio Pellegrin belongs to the rare category of intellectual artists and holds a unique place within the contemporary art scene: too realist in philosophy to be considered a typical conceptual, too cosmopolitan to indulge in some vernacular art, too culturally and aesthetically refined to encroach upon Pop, Minimal experiences.

From the world in its givenness he draws the materials that he lets resemble the phenomenic datum but deriving from it an energy that witnesses its vitality and fascination. He does not photograph reality, but invents an evocative realism, thus avoiding the illustration of the object. The effect of the images thus composed is highly aesthetical, communicative and cathartic, so that no confirmation through the comparison with reality itself is needed.

Big-sized assemblages made up by objects or their fragments form stately icons, and not simple archives or catalogs of a partial memory. In these works, the world is neither illustrated nor narrated, but rather divined and shown as it is given in a phenomenological and existential sense. Pellegrin, by his refined artistic work brings a new order into the effectual, chaotic and dispersive reality of things, and incorporates also elements of disorder, chance and instinctual nature. And together with them, through the impact of the work, it is man who learns to be, not only in space, but also in time thanks to memory that gives him the sense of continuity and an identity.” (Igino Schraffl).

“In addition to the visual poetry of Pellegrin's work, what resonates, is the idea that as we experience globalization at an ever increasing pace, the distinction between cultures begins to flatten. I cherish these differences which have inspired curiosity and a joy to learn and gain perspective. I mourn the passing of a time when objects singularly represented a culture, a history, and time. Through his work, Pellegrin honors these cultures, objects, and their histories, which have a way of lingering in our minds.” (Camille Obering)

Maurizio Pellegrin was born in Venice, 1956, and lives in New York. He counts more than 150 solo exhibitions and almost 400 group exhibitions in major galleries and museums around the world, and his works and sculptures are in the major private and public collections. He is author and subject of more than 30 monographs and his work is published in more than 500 articles and essays. Selected Exhibitions: San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C; Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; BM-SUMA Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul, Turkey, and the Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice, Italy. Michela Rizzo Gallery is planning a large solo show of Pellegrin's work during the Venice Biennnale in 2021 and another project will be held at the church of San Ludovico, directed by Nuova Icona.

Mr. Pellegrin was the Director of Master Programs, and he has taught for thirty years at many universities, NYU, Columbia, and Rhode Island School of Design. He was the Dean at the National Academy Museum & School in New York, Chief Executive for the Cultural Affairs of I.R.E. and Fondazione Venezia, in Venice, and he is currently the Executive Director of the New York School of the Arts and the HUB Center for the Arts.

Jackson Hole, Wyoming, April 3, 2020 - Camille Obering Fine Art, is pleased to release documentation from “Photosymphony: A Live Plant Orchestra” the resulting work from the large-scale immersive installation “Photosymphony: A Live Plant Orchestra” presented at Guesthouse in 2019. “Photosymphony: A Live Plant Orchestra”, was a collaboration between performance artist Millie Brown, composer and musician Benyaro, and Camille Obering.

We are all made of star matter … all life on earth can communicate through the language of frequency.

An experimental sonic exploration, “Photosymphony: A Live Plant Orchestra” aspired to open viewer’s minds to the concept of joint connectivity between humans and plant life, reaffirming that all life is intelligent life and that we are all one, living an interconnected energetic existence.

The world premiere of "Photosymphony: A Live Plant Orchestra" at Guesthouse in Jackson Hole, Wyoming featured regional native plants whose frequencies were captured, and by way of MIDI technology, translated into sound, giving the plants their own voices. The plant orchestra was led by three plants performing violin, viola and cello, modeled after the instruments of a classic string quartet. Additional plants expressed themselves through sounds of the sun, planets, frequency of life, womb, and female orgasm, among others.

Photosymphony allows viewers to simultaneously observe and become part of the energetic exchange with the plants, therefore contributing to the living orchestra through their presence. The installation is a cross pollination of art, music, technology, mindfulness, and highlights our connection to nature, giving the audience the singular experience of listening to plant life express itself.

MILLIE BROWN (b. London, 1986 -) is renowned for her long-durational performances and radical art activism, in which she uses her body to challenge common perceptions of human nature and understanding, exploring the separation of flesh and mind through the physical and immaterial. Hailed as one of the new YBAs (Young British Artists), Brown joined South London’s art collective !WOWOW! at 17, becoming the youngest member of the impactful subcultural Art movement. Founding her practice in 2003, Brown has subsequently gained world-wide notoriety for her performances and installations, receiving ‘visual artist of the year’ in 2018 and with multiple collaborations with iconoclasts such as Nick Knight, Lady Gaga, Tony Kaye & Ellen Von Unwerth. Brown has performed for Jeffrey Deitch, Grazyna Kulczyk, within and in collaboration with prestigious Museums, galleries, and cultural institutions around the world, including Chapman Fine Arts, Ace Gallery, Tate Britain, MOCA Miami, LACMA, Chicago Expo, Brooklyn Museum, Marina Abramovich Institute, National Arts Club NYC and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture.

BEN MUSSER is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, singer, music supervisor and sound designer. In addition to scoring music for films and commercials, Ben is the creative force behind BENYARO, the SXSW official "punk-Americana" band who has shared stages with artists such as Gary Clark Jr., Buddy Guy, The Avett Brothers, Shovels n' Rope and recently performed the ASCAP Music Café @ Sundance Film Festival. Ben produced and sound designed the art installation "A Live Plant Orchestra" at Guesthouse in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

CAMILLE OBERING is an art advisor and curator who seeks unique opportunities to present distinct cultural programming. Camille runs Guesthouse, a project space in Jackson Hole that welcomes artists and musicians to create and present new work. She has worked for and with institutions such as the Whitney Museum, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Architectural Digest, 1 Hotel Miami Beach, Pace Gallery, Marlborough, Various Small Fires and with artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Paul McCarthy, Matthew Day Jackson, Glenn Kaino, Tara Donovan, Kiki Smith, Michele Oka Doner, and Brandon Stosuy. She is also a member of the curatorial group Peradam Capital.

Images (c) 2019 Camille Obering Fine Art, LLC

Non transferable.

Jackson Hole, WY – February 7th, 2020 – Camille Obering Fine Art is pleased to announce “Incomplete Drawings of Decolonization”, an exhibition of new work by Colorado based artist Anna Tsouhlarakis. On view February 7th – March 23, 2020 by appointment.

Anna Tsouhlarakis, Navajo, has always been interested in the connections between Native American Art and Minimalism. The restraint of color and use of essential forms are especially significant in both genres of art. She has continually maintained her faithfulness to these qualities whether working in sculpture, video, or installation. In this body of work, Anna examines conversations of decolonization, which abound in academia and political movements, and redirects the focus onto the decolonization of art, reframed through an Indigenous lens.

The work of Sol Lewitt was identified as a starting point for her investigation. Specifically, his studies of incomplete cubes that can be seen as a building block of contemporary art and a symbol of the literal cube in which art is shown. In LeWitt’s 1978 MOMA catalogue Robert Rosenblum reiterates this point, “Lewitt’s search for the building blocks of form, for the basic alphabet, vocabulary, and grammar of all structures, is one that has a deeply ingrained tradition in the history of modern art…”

In defining modes of decolonization, consideration must be given to how one is “indigenized”, or how one came to be a decolonizer. In Navajo traditions, the act of binding is a technique used to teach self-control, respect, and balance within the worlds of human and nature. Cradleboards, used by nearly every Native American tribe in some form, help ease an infant’s lack of bodily control to create a space of peacefulness. As Navajos grow up, we are taught to keep our hair clean and tied back. This provides clarity of mind and positive intention as one goes through life. Throughout Navajo culture, there are many other ways this act of binding provides a way of being in the world. Translating this technique and Navajo mark making as a method of decolonization of art, is the foundation of Tsouhlarakis’ current practice.

The connection between minimalism and contemporary culture come together within the modern design of IKEA. In past projects, remnant pieces of IKEA furniture were sourced from the “as is” section of the retailer and used to form sculptures and installations. In this new project, the white IKEA remnant pieces become stand-ins for LeWitt’s incomplete cubes—the Western form in need of decolonization.

While LeWitt began this exploration of form, it is Tsouhlarakis’ intention to continue this trajectory and reimagine its destination.

“I believe that ideas, once expressed, become the common property of all. They are invalid if not used, they can only be given away and cannot be stolen. Ideas of art become the vocabulary of art and are used by other artists to form their own ideas…”

-Sol LeWitt, Flash Art 1973

Tsouhlarakis’ adeptly examines the relationship between, contemporary art, Native culture, and contemporary design to express both a new construct through which we understand the evolution of contemporary art, while simultaneously expressing her place in the modern world as both a Native and a person integrated in to contemporary society. Bringing these elements together Anna has created sculptures and drawings, expressing the harmonies and tensions in this relationship.

BIOGRAPHY

Anna Tsouhlarakis was born in Lawrence, Kansas and was raised in Taos, New Mexico. Her family comes from the Navajo Nation in New Mexico and the island of Crete, Greece. In 1999 she received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Dartmouth College in Native American Studies and Studio Art. She then attended Yale University and received her Masters of Fine Arts degree in sculpture in 2002.

Tsouhlarakis has participated in various art residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Yaddo. She has been part of exhibitions at Rush Arts in New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. In 2011, she was a recipient of the Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art. Her recent awards include fellowships from the Harpo Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation.

Currently, she is in a traveling exhibition Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now. The exhibition “examines the practices and perspectives of the most influential Native artists and their important contributions to American art…” and was listed as one of the “most promising museum shows around the world” by ARTNews. An anthology of Native American art accompanies the exhibition.

In the spring of 2021, Tsouhlarakis will be part of the National Portrait Gallery’s “Portraiture Now” exhibition in Washington, DC and will also have four performances throughout the year in the NPG as part of the “IDENTIFY: Performance Art as Portraiture” series.

In addition to the National Portrait Gallery, Tsouhlarakis has upcoming exhibitions at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, and the Fine Arts Center Museum at Colorado College.

She is the current Andrew W. Mellon Artist-in-Residence at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, CO. In the fall of 2020, she will begin a tenure track Assistant Professor position in the Art and Art History department at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Grand Teton National Park Photography of Alexander Lindsay will be presented at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in the Bridger Gondola Storage Barn, August 1 - 6, 2019

Alexander Lindsay, born 1961, creates monumental landscape photographs of extraordinary honesty, clarity and beauty. He has developed his own techniques to capture and print, in minute detail and on an epic scale, wilderness regions of the world at and beyond the edges of human influence. He pushes photographic processes and technology to extreme levels but choses to eschew all forms of photoshop manipulation or artifice. His photographic art process is as ‘pure’ as he can make it, reflecting the unsentimental, raw essence of the environments he lives in for his work.

In 2015, he came to photograph the Grand Teton Mountain Range of Wyoming, USA. Alexander’s initial interest in photography began aged 16 with an introduction to the works of Ansel Adams, who worked extensively, and who created some of his most iconic images, in this beautiful mountain range. Alexander spent the entire months of January and September 2015 walking and photographing in the mountains and Grand Teton National Park for a private commission. These works are now being exhibited for the first time to an American audience.

Following his extensive background as a war cameraman and deep ocean film maker, Alexander’s photographs of the Tetons can seduce with their beauty and detail, but behind these seductive images the very antithesis that modern life is increasingly about is laid out in huge and savage focus, bearing artistic witness to the fragility and rarity of our remaining untouched world.

For the past 35 years, Alexander has brought his film and stills cameras to some of the most extreme situations and environments on the planet. His earliest experiences living with and photographing the Maasai tribe in Tanzania led him in to documentary film making. He made war documentaries over a 5 year period in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, immersing himself within both sides of the conflict. He then filmed within Iraq during the First Gulf War (subsequently returning to Iraq for the Second Gulf War in 2004). This was followed by 5 years of pioneering documentary filming and photography of the wreck of the Titanic, 4km beneath the ocean’s waves, at one point even entering the wreck itself in a submersible.

These varied documentary experiences ultimately led him to his freest artistic expression as a photographer of our imperiled natural world. Linking all his projects, Alexander has always sought to immerse himself in situations where, as he explains, ‘the imagination is rendered unnecessary’.

His work has been exhibited internationally, and his photographs are included in major private and corporate collections around the world. He also works on specific commissions for corporate and private clients.

Alexander will be available for private tours of the exhibition. This extensive exhibition presents limited edition photographs ranging in size from 40” to nearly 20 ft wide. All works will be for sale.

Open to the public:

August 1- 10am - 6pm
August 2 - 10am - 6pm
August 3 - 10am - 4pm

August 4 - 10am - 8pm
August 5 - 10am - 5pm

August 6 - 10am - 8pm

Camille Obering Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening of Guesthouse, with Transcendent Yellowstone, an exhibition of new work by Jackson, WY based artist Andy Kincaid. On view from June 24th – August 4th by appointment.

Drawing on historical signifiers from his immediate surroundings Kincaid speculates on a path from Thomas Moran and the establishment of Yellowstone as a National Park, into a near-future aggregate of environmental tourism, recreation, risk, luck, and privilege, extrapolating the role of a single painting, through time, into an international phenomenon of environmental valuations.

Thomas Moran's painting, “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” was purchased by the US congress in 1872. This depiction, along with other context from a collaborative Western expedition, moved lawmakers to establish a national park, setting aside the first of many tracts of land as unsettleable preserves. 1972, a century later, through The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Yellowstone National Park was deemed an inaugural World Heritage Site.

Presented first in this exhibition as a photogravure plate, Moran's monumental painting is rescaled for a mode of mass reproduction. Possibly a falsified artifact, this plate hangs in an ambiguity between artwork and tool, means and end, new and old. These uncertainties only persist as the exhibition progresses, from a circa 1972 National Park Service souvenir display counter to paintings and objects embedded in the aesthetics of contemporary environmental recreation and survival. Here the work shifts to implicate the integrated medical, security, travel risk and crisis management services company, Global Rescue, as Kincaid splices it into World Heritage creating a fictitious or future brand, Global World: Heritage Rescue.

The exhibition concludes with a foreboding sculpture comprised of a hammock suspended below a massive A frame ladder; a tool of self-positioning for extended bad luck.

Andy Kincaid (b. Minneapolis, 1986) is an artist and curator who lives and works in Jackson Hole, Wyoming where he runs the gallery Holiday Forever, and is part of the curatorial group Peradam Capital. Recent exhibitions include the Wyoming Biennial - University of Wyoming Art Museum - Laramie, WY, and solo exhibitions at the Nicolaysen Art Museum - Casper, WY and at Et Al, San Francisco. Additionally the artist has exhibited at Leroy's - Los Angeles, MINT - Columbus, The Neon Heater - Findlay OH, Yeah Maybe - Minneapolis, SiTE:LAB - Grand Rapids, MI, ACRE projects - Chicago, Altered Esthetics - Minneapolis, The Trout Museum of Art - Appleton, WI, The Neville Museum - Green Bay, WI, among others, with an upcoming exhibition at The Rectory Projects - London, UK. Drawing from personal interest, Kincaid's work is often informed by his relationships with the outdoors,

specifically time spent in the Tetons and along the Oregon Trail, as well as a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail.

Guesthouse is a private studio space in Jackson Hole, WY, which invites artists, musicians and creators, to explore and present new ideas. The space is run by art advisor and curator Camille Obering, and Ben Musser (Benyaro), a multi-instrumentalist and composer. In addition, Obering is part of the curatorial group Peradam Capital.

Camille Obering, Matthew Day Jackson, and Andy Kincaid, known as Peradam Capital, were the 2017 Creative in Residences for the Center for the Arts in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  Peradam Capital presented "Observatories" an exhibition of sculpture, video and performance art activating The Center and greater Jackson Hole throughout summer 2017. Using the eclipse as a metaphor, the team aimed to illuminate aspects of Jackson Hole as representative as “the last of the old west”. The constituent forms and images which create the illusion of the “West” often obfuscate that which they purport to represent. "Observatories" offered viewers new ways of interpreting the past and present from which to consider the future of this community and its context.  Artist included in the show were, Arturo Bandini, Sarah Braman, Glenn Kaino, Liz Magic Laser, James Luna, Ati Maier, Paul and Damon McCarthy, Shana Moulton, Eduardo Navarro, and Anna Tsouhlarakis.  Descriptions of each of the artworks can be found here.

Experience Liz Magic Laser's "Thought Leader" installed in a school bus here.  The full video of "Thought Leader" can be seen here.

Shana Moulton's video for "Self Transforming Machine Van" installed in a mini van for viewer to climb in and experience on a bean bag can be seen here.

Ati Maier's Performance of "Space Rider" at the Teton County Rodea grounds will be forth coming. 

To see a time lapse of the 2017 Solar Eclipse click here

ARTIST INTERVIEWS

Ati Maier on KHOL- https://soundcloud.com/891fmkhol/ati-maier-on-khol

Shana Moulton on KHOL - http://www.891khol.org/shana-moulton-on-khol/

James Luna on KHOL - http://www.891khol.org/james-luna-on-khol/

Glenn Kaino on KHOL - http://www.891khol.org/glenn-kaino-on-khol/

Sarah Braman on KHOL - http://www.891khol.org/sarah-braman-on-khol/

Anna Tsouhlarakis on KHOL - http://www.891khol.org/anna-tsouhlarakis-on-khol/

Arturo Bandini on KHOL - https://soundcloud.com/891fmkhol/arturo-bandini

Camille Obering, Matthew Day Jackson, and Andy Kincaid (Peradam Capital) presented a Full Moon Ski 2017 and An Evening of Ski & Art Films. 

A small group of artists gathered on February, 10th 2017 to experience the full moon rise over the Gros Ventre range which makes up the eastern edge of what is known as Jackson Hole, Wyoming. At 6500 feet above sea level, the reflected light of the sun produces an amazing amount of light illuminating the eastern slope of the Teton Range. The moonlight both illuminates and seemingly flattens this world famous geologic feature, the effect is strange and to experience this will be memorable for some time.  

On February 11th, community members were invited to watch two films, “Where the Wind Blows” by Ari Marcopoulos and "Frostheaves" by Damon McCarthy and Benjamin Weissman. Both films are a decided break from the archetype of the contemporary ski film.  As Carrie Richer said, "Most people don't know how difficult it is to shoot a ski film in the backcountry on 16 mm or in Iran's backcountry for that matter. Prepare to be surprised and inspired by these atypical ski films and by the late and great Craig Kelly's perspective." 

Camille Obering Fine Art and Matthew Day Jackson presented “Rural Violence III (Rebirth)” in Jackson Hole, WY, August 2016. “Rural Violence III (Rebirth)” written and directed by Brandon Stosuy and performed by John Shahnazarian, Dana Wachs, Angel Deradoorian, and Lionel Maunz, invited viewers to become part of a visceral artwork. One viewer, former lead architect at LACMA responded this way:

“The whole thing was totally surreal– I’m beyond impressed by what you pulled off and am so excited I was there to witness your mind-expanding cultural combustion in person.”

Incorporating aspects of “Rural Violence I” (Troy, New York), “Rural Violence II” (Matthew Barney’s REMAINS), “Rural Violence III (Rebirth)” embraced the raw surroundings of Wyoming, with a ceremonious unearthing, butchering and then cooking a lamb over an open fire. The piece honored gifts from the earth which we are privileged to enjoy without shielding us from the difficult aspects of our relationship with nature. Suspending time and zooming in on the violent, eerie, gorgeous, and mundane, the piece invited viewers to reflect on themselves and greater society.
Among the themes addressed:

– Creating awareness of the unsavory things occurring to provide us with the luxuries we often thoughtlessly consume (food production, electricity, transportation, cheap anything).

– Destruction verses creation.

– Humanity’s animalistic instincts such as dominance, submission, struggle, and proliferation, and acknowledging the grey area that exists separating humans from beasts.

– Persecution of the innocent.

– Tensions created between what one considers natural verses amoral.

– Death and destruction leading to life and enlightenment.

– How sanitized and curated our lives have become, and how short our attention spans have become.

– Finding beauty in and meditating on something that can be considered brutal.

The exhibition “Invocation/Remnant,” curated by Camille Obering and Andy Kincaid and presented at Holiday Forever as a companion to “Rural Violence III”, pulled from the content of the performance and included the work of Matthew Barney, Matthew Day Jackson and Lionel Maunz, as well as George Clarke and Dana Wachs, who performed an invocation, calling up the following day’s performance. Images can be found here. The exhibition included Matthew Barney’s seminal work SCABACTION a Partial and Promised Gift of Pamela and Richard Kramlich to the New Art Trust to benefit the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate United Kingdom.

Teaser of the Performance

Camille Obering Fine Art was hired to curate a show for Architectural Digest for the occasion of Art Basel Miami Beach 2015.  The exhibition, REFUGE was presented at the Beach Club of 1 Hotel (2341 Collins Avenue), opening with a party on December 1, 2015 and running through December 6, 2015.  Architectural Digest commissioned the exhibition of five, large-scale outdoor installations.  Artists included in the show were Hilary Harnischfeger, Robert Lazzarini, Philippe Malouin, Michele Oka Doner, and Carlos Rolón/Dzine   The natural and cultural characteristics of Miami, as well as the landscape and architecture of the site, inspired each of the installations.  The audience was invited to actively participate in each artwork, offering viewers opportunities for transcendent moments of personal reflection and refuge amid the chaos of contemporary urban life.

HILARY HARNISCHFEGER, DELHI MOUND, 2015, steel, glass, hydrostone, silicone, minerals, wood, basins

Hilary Harnischfeger employs varied and often discarded materials such as molds, paper, plaster, clay, porcelain, ink, and chunks of rock and quartz to create tactilely seductive pieces. In Delhi Mound, Harnischfeger’s use of an exposed steel armature, hydrostone, and reconfigured ceramic and glass sink basins that present raw minerals further expand on her exploration of seemingly contradicting materials. Her work has a geological quality to it and a sense of discovery. Through Delhi Mound, Harnischfeger frames out a section of the landscape with an arch, which activates the viewer’s relationship with the piece and the landscape around it. Delhi Mound, which references an upstate New York town where she spent a summer residency, is Harnischfeger’s first outdoor sculpture and her largest sculpture conceived to date.

Harnischfeger has had solo exhibitions at Rachel Uffner Gallery; American University Museum; Halsey McKay Gallery; Neverwork; and Moody Gallery. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, among them shows at Cleveland Museum of Art; MOCA Cleveland; James Cohan Gallery, Shanghai; James Fuentes; V1 Gallery, Copenhagen; Eleven Rivington; Dallas Contemporary; Ballroom Marfa; Artists Space; Elizabeth Dee Gallery; and Grimm Fine Art, Amsterdam.

ROBERT LAZZARINI, UNTITLED, 2015, paint

Robert Lazzarini is a New York–based artist whose work is rooted in ideas of phenomenology. His artworks have the effect of confusing visual and haptic space, complicating the space of pictures and the space of things. His work challenges basic perceptual tenets and interrupts the viewer’s habituated processes of visual recognition.

Lazzarini’s paintings combine both appropriated and constructed imagery.They make use of merging two-dimensional moirés with shadow moirés as a way of simultaneously mapping forms and obfuscating them. Moments of hard opticality convey the artist’s interest in phenomenology and the physical experience of a work of art.

For this installation, Lazzarini utilizes an inverted trapezoid to show a pair of female eyes peering out from the wall both through the patterning of lines in the image and the physical palm trees in front of it.

Lazzarini has been exhibited nationally and internationally since 1995, and is included in major collections such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Walker Art Center.

PHILIPPE MALOUIN, MOVEMENTS, 2015, steel, rope, caesarstone

Canadian Philippe Malouin is a designer and artist who examines the unexpected use of materials in everyday life. Movements, which incorporates a 12-piece swing set and an array of handmade planters, is an interactive installation juxtaposing the natural, organic beach scenery with the minimalist, monolithic language investigated by the designer. Because of its circular arrangement, each swing faces another to encourage an interaction that is at once individual and communal. At the center of Movements, a forest-like cluster of planters documents Malouin’s process of experimentation with a material originating from sand. He explores a very different range of techniques, such as hand-sculpting, traditional inlay and marquetry, as well as the material’s versatility and color.

Malouin studied at the University of Montreal, the École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle in Paris, and Eindhoven Design Academy in the Netherlands, and worked for English designer Tom Dixon before opening his own studio in 2009. Malouin has won the W Hotels’ “Designer of the Future” award and Wallpaper’s “Best Use of Material” award. He lives and works in London, where he operates his design studio.

MICHELE OKA DONER, MANGROVE RETREAT, 2015, fabric, bamboo, steel, paint

Michele Oka Doner is an internationally renowned artist whose career spans four decades. Oka Doner’s work is fueled by a lifelong study and appreciation of the natural world, from which she derives her formal vocabulary. Mangrove Retreat is a new take on an old theme. Mangroves have offered their sheltering leaves to countless visitors to South Florida, from the indigenous natives to the Keys’ fishermen. They create a home for native fish hatcheries and, here, a home for locals and travelers to Art Basel Miami Beach. Oka Doner has created a tradition worth keeping and translating into a shared future.

Oka Doner is well-known for creating more than 35 public art installations throughout the U.S. and Europe, including A Walk on the Beach at the Miami International Airport (1995–2010), which features 9,000 bronze sculptures in laid over a mile-and-a-quarter-long concourse of terrazzo with mother-of-pearl, one of the largest public artworks in the world. She is currently working on designing the costumes and sets for George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Miami City Ballet, which will debut concurrently with her solo exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in March 2016.

Oka Doner’s artwork can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Princeton University Art Museum.

CARLOS ROLÓN/DZINE, BOCHINCHE, 2015, thassos marble, re-purposed wood, steel, seashells, vegetation, ceramic, porcelain and mirror

Carlos Rolón/Dzine has been recognized for his elaborately crafted paintings, ornate sculptures, and site-specific installations that investigate pop culture, craft, ritual, beauty and its relationship to art history, subculture, and appropriation. Bochinche is inspired by the idea of Puerto Rican people gathering and having discussion, debate, or gossiping in front of a neighbor’s home or on benches in a local Pueblo (town square). Rolón’s installation incorporates three custom marble benches surrounding a central sculpture of wrought-iron fence work, handmade macramé, and the exotic floral vegetation that would surround one’s home. Bochinche harkens back to a day before smartphones and social media served as a central place for friends and acquaintances to gather, chat, and build community.

Recently Rolón was commissioned by the University of Chicago Arts + Public Life program to create a sculpture as part of the exhibition “Forms of Imagination”as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Rolón’s work will be the subject of two solo exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center and the Museo de Artede Ponce in 2016.

The artist has held solo exhibitions at the Dallas Contemporary, Bass Museum of Art, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, and CAM Contemporary Art Museum.

For four decades, Mary Obering has cultivated a mode of geometric abstraction that marries the formal rigor of American Minimalism with the harmonious serenity of old master religious painting. Obering typically paints on masonite panels with deep sides that emphasize the work’s three-dimensional presence. The painted sides demand a mobile viewer who will observe the play of light and perspectival shifts in geometry that arise from different vantage points. While Obering’s compositions are geometric and orderly, she brings a sensualist’s spirit to this rational mode. Her practice is steeped in art history, as seen in her materials—egg tempera paint she mixes herself and reflective sheets of gold leaf—which have their origins in medieval and early Renaissance altar painting. She works with a highly evocative palette that brims with references to these traditions as well as her own experiences. A vivid rectangle of midnight blue can recall the gown of the Virgin Mary in a Duccio altar panel, while a swatch of burnt sienna could be inspired by the sun-drenched architecture of southern Italy where Obering has a second home. She painstakingly builds up her paintings through repeated applications of paint, at times yielding a smooth opacity and at others more mottled and brushy textures. These richly layered surfaces fully showcase tempera’s ability to create jewel-like planes of radiant color. This precious quality of her art is further enhanced by her use of both white and yellow gold leaf to impart a striking element of material luxury.

Mary Obering was born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1937. She attended Hollins College in Virginia in the fifties and then went to graduate school at Radcliffe to study psychology. Art had always been a passion of hers, and by the time she was in her thirties, she realized that it had to be more than a mere hobby. She enrolled at the University of Denver and earned her MFA in 1971. The following summer while traveling with her daughter in Italy, she met the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. They quickly became friends, and when she moved to New York shortly thereafter, Andre facilitated her introduction to the city’s thriving art world. Obering continues to divide her time between New York and Italy, spending the spring and fall at her home in Santa Maria di Leuca and the winter and summer at her Soho loft. She has exhibited internationally at galleries and museums for forty years, and her work can be found in the collections of such major institutions as the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the Detroit Institute of Art, the Muse de Arte (Costa Rica), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York).

Camille Obering Fine Art worked with the architect and interior design team to assist the client with curating the art for their newly remodeled home in Chelsea. Using both works in their current collection and assisting with the purchase and placement of new artwork, the team was able to achieve a stunning finished product which reflected the personality and style of the client.

This was apartment was featured in the Elle Décor magazine in 2008.

Camille Obering Fine Art presented work by Kiki Smith and Lee Ufan, juxtaposing two artists who have explored the possibility of man co-existing with nature in harmony.  Each artist approaches this subject in distinct ways, but with great success.

Kiki Smith was born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany. The daughter of American sculptor Tony Smith, Kiki Smith grew up in New Jersey. As a young girl, one of Smith’s first experiences with art was helping her father make cardboard models for his geometric sculptures. This training in formalist systems, combined with her upbringing in the Catholic Church, would later resurface in Smith’s evocative sculptures, drawings, and prints. The recurrent subject matter in Smith’s work has been the body as a receptacle for knowledge, belief, and storytelling. In the 1980s, Smith literally turned the figurative tradition in sculpture inside out, creating objects and drawings based on organs, cellular forms, and the human nervous system. This body of work evolved to incorporate animals, domestic objects, and narrative tropes from classical mythology and folk tales. Life, death, and resurrection are thematic signposts in many of Smith’s installations and sculptures. In the works “Dreaming with Bear” and ” Girl with Stars” Smith speaks to astrology and our fascination with constellations as a way to connect to and understand our universe. In “Dreaming with Bear” a girl rests peacefully on the back of a bear, perhaps signifying our most familial relationship to the Big Dipper or Ursa Major (Big Bear). In “Girl with Stars” a girl crawls across the sky with stars streaming behind her lighting the sky. She looks back in awe at the celestial trail.

Smith received the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000, the Athena Award for Excellence in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005, the fiftieth Edward MacDowell Medal from the MacDowell Colony in 2009, and has participated in the Whitney Biennial three times in the past decade. In 2005, Smith was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Smith’s work is in numerous prominent museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Smith lives and works in New York City.

LEE UFAN
Relatum – expansion place, 2008 steel, stone, 10″ x 87″ x 10-1/2″ 2 steel plates, each 15″ x 18″ x 16″ dark stone, 15″ x 15″ x 12″, light stone

Relatum – expansion place was included in Marking Infinity a retrospective devoted to Lee Ufan at the Guggenheim Museum in 2011. The following is an exert from the show.

The work of artist-philosopher Lee Ufan, charts visual, conceptual, and theoretical terrain that has radically expanded the possibilities for painting and sculpture since the 1960s. Lee is acclaimed for an innovative body of work that revolves around the notion of encounter—seeing the bare existence of what is actually before us and focusing on “the world as it is.”

Lee was born in southern Korea in 1936 and witnessed the political convulsions that beset the Korean peninsula from the Japanese occupation to the Korean War, which left the country divided in 1953. He studied painting at the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University and soon moved to Japan, where he earned a degree in philosophy. Over the last 40 years, he has lived and worked in Korea, Japan, and France, becoming a transnational artist in a postmodern world before those terms were current. “The dynamics of distance have made me what I am,” he remarks.

In the late 1960s, in an artistic environment emphasizing ideas of system, structure, and process, Lee emerged as the theoretical leader of Mono-ha (literally, “School of Things”), a Japanese movement that arose amid the collapse of colonial world orders, anti-authoritarian protests, and the rise of critiques of modernity. Lee’s sculptures, presenting dispersed arrangements of stones together with industrial materials like steel plates, rubber sheets, and glass panes, recast the object as a network of relations based on parity among the viewer, materials, and site. Lee was a pivotal figure in the Korean tansaekhwa (monochrome painting) school, which offered a fresh approach to minimalist abstraction by presenting repetitive gestural marks as bodily records of time’s perpetual passage. Deeply versed in modern philosophy and Asian metaphysics, Lee has coupled his artistic practice with a prodigious body of critical and philosophical writings.
Whether brush marks on canvas or stones placed just so on the ground, his markings in space elicit momentary, open-ended situations that engage the viewer viscerally. His distilled gestures, manifesting an extraordinary ethics of restraint, create an emptiness that is paradoxically generative and vivid.
Since his early Mono-ha period, Lee has restricted his choice of sculptural materials to steel plates and stones, focusing on their precise conceptual and spatial juxtaposition. The steel plate—hard, heavy, solid—is made to build things in the modern world; the stone, in its natural as-is state, “belongs to an unknown world” beyond the self and outside modernity, evoking “the other” or “externality.”

Arranging the plates in precise relationships to the stones, Lee’s Relatum series (1968– ) presents a durational form of coexistence between the made and the not made, the material and the immaterial elements of our surroundings. The series title is a philosophical term denoting terms, objects, or events between which a relation exists. In Lee’s mind, the occasion of the site-specific work and the network of dynamics it triggers is more important than the object per se, and we the viewer enter the scene as an equal part of the whole.

MICHELE OKA DONER

Michele Oka Doner: Earth Fire Air Water, highlights Oka Doner’s life long interest in connecting nature and humanity through both art practice and design objects. The selected pieces reflect Oka Doner’s own interpretation of the elements. The show will include five 96 x 48 inch, one 72 x 36 inch, and two 46 x 46 inch relief prints from organic material such as grasses, roots, and branches, representing earth. The organic material is composed on printing plates to reflect the human form in various ways. This involves both risk taking and the element of chance, as the materials have the inclination to move as they are inked and then subjected to the rigors of the printing process itself. When the press blankets are pulled back and the image revealed, the resulting larger than life figures seem to have given birth to themselves. The size and presence of these monumental pieces will surround and tower over the gallery space. Placed on the floor in the middle of the surrounding human relief prints will be Oka Doner’s star bases (fire), cast bronze sculptures resembling root systems, and which hold candles. The star bases are reminiscent of explosions, with energy bursting from the center of the form. They are derived from forming rotting wood elements, the detritus of very old tree roots – the flotsam and jetsam of the woods – with wax until the burst transcended the earth and becomes star-like, and cosmic in nature. The fire they emit when used to hold candles reaffirms their celestial other side. Visitors will then ascend the stairs to the more ephemeral air/bird like prints of organic material embedded in abaca paper (air & water) surrounding one fish bowl (water). The abaca prints are created with water. Pulverized banana fiber and plant material becomes pulp, formed on a wooden rack and turned onto felt. After an intervention by Oka Doner, this too is pressed until the water is gone and the paper dries flat.

CATEGORIES

Art Exhibition 

MICHELE OKA DONER

Neil Jenney (b. 1945) has been a defiantly unique voice in contemporary art for over forty years. Since the 60s a driving force behind Jenney’s work has been the relationship between things. He first explored these concepts and relationships in sculpture, but later moved to painting and printmaking.

In 1967, legendary dealer Richard Bellamy discovered and showed Jenney’s “linear sculptures” on Madison Avenue as part of a group exhibition with Jean Arp, Richard Artschwager, Walter De Maria, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra. In 1968 Jenney created a series of sculptures made with found materials. Termed “theatrical” or “environmental,” these works eventually morphed into a structure of “these things and those things relating.” He showed some of these pieces at Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne, in November 1968.

Upon returning to the United States that fall, Jenney discovered an art scene soaked in Photorealism. Feeling that this was a second-generation Pop art solution that was “a bad idea done pretty,” the artist decided to paint “good ideas done badly.” His Bad Paintings, which involved “the relationship of things to things,” occupied his career from 1969 to 1970. In late 1970 Jenney decided that a more interesting challenge was Good Painting, and he has produced such works since 1971.

Jenney’s prints draw on ideas expressed in the ”Bad Paintings,” but in clean simplified text and colors. On white canvas’ Jenney prints in black boxes, declarations of artistic and social philosophies. Andy Warhol declared that Jenney’s prints were paintings not prints as Warhol’s paintings were completed in the same process a Jenney’s prints.

Neil Jenney work is in major permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Exhibitions include a retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California (1981, traveled to Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Dale Chihuly and Tara Donovan: Organic Forms

Organic Forms comes from an interest in artists’ struggles to understand nature and honor its organic growth and forms realized through various mediums. The artists Dale Chihuly and Tara Donovan are considered masters at bringing out the beauty and previously unknown potential of their choice of materials in a way that mimics their observations of, and inspirations drawn from the natural world.

Dale Chihuly uses blown glass as a vehicle for sculpture, focusing on the vessel in his explorations of color and form.  Drawing from nature and the unconscious, he infuses his ambiguous forms with passionate colors, creating vessels that communicate a range of aesthetic experiences, from the ephemeral moods to highly emotional and transformational environments. He is a pioneer of the glass arts movement, breaking down barriers separating fine arts from crafts and influencing generations of artists who followed him to explore the medium of glass in their work. Interestingly in addition to nature a formative influence for his work were baskets from the NW Coast Indians.

Tara Donovan uses everyday manufactured materials such tape, paper plates, plastic cups, toothpicks, and buttons to create sculptures that often have a biomorphic quality.  With acute awareness of the aesthetic properties of her materials, Donovan takes mass quantities of these everyday items and “assembles them in different ways, providing the viewer with a compelling, perceptually transformative experience,” according to The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which named the artist a recipient of the “genius” grant in 2008. For example in Untitled (Paper Plates), Donovan is aware of how the scalloped edges of a simple paper plate absorb light differently to create an animated visual experience. She assembles her paper plate series in ways that reflect globular crystalline growth or are reminiscent of reefs.   In Bluffs she uses buttons stacked on top of one another to create an object that looks like mountain bluffs or stalagmites. The piece has a glowing effect because the holes in the buttons reflect and absorb light in different ways and the surfaces of the buttons have a translucent quality to them. Donovan’s sculptures seduce viewers to take a closer look only to surprise them at how the object has transcended its medium.

ANDREW WYETH, N.C. WYETH, JAMIE WYETH

Wyeth: A Survey presents watercolor, egg tempera, oil, and mixed media paintings by Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth, and N.C. Wyeth. The Wyeths, a dynasty in the art world, produced some of Americas most influential and well-know painters.
Andrew Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was the youngest child of famed illustrator and artist N.C. Wyeth. N.C. had high ambitions for his five children and hoped they would grow up to be fine artists. Each child was groomed to be such, but it was his youngest, Andrew, who stood out. As a child, Andrew was home-tutored because of his frail health and his father’s desire to train him to excel as a draftsman and painter. Andrew took to this position and grew to be deeply inspired by the landscape and regional inhabitants of both their hometown in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and their summer home in Cushing, Maine. Andrew mastered figure study and watercolor at an early age. Later he learned and pursued egg tempera painting, which he preferred to oil painting and considered an antidote to his watercolors. Through these mediums, he gained fame as a realist painter during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Despite being considered a realist painter, some argue that he adopted an abstract style to communicate emotion especially in his watercolors. Throughout his career, rural landscapes, a sense of romance, human presence and the passage of time were touchstones of his artwork.

Though many surrounding people and places undoubtedly influenced Andrew’s work, it is important to understand two significant events in his life that directly shaped his oeuvre. The first and most important was his father’s untimely death in 1945. In earlier work such as Marshall Point Light (1940)and Dogwood at Valley Forge (1941), Andrew used a lighter palette and depicted a less melancholy world than the one he later saw. Devastated by his father’s death, Andrew’s art focused into his mature and enduring style: a subdued color palette, realistic renderings, and the depiction of emotionally charged, symbolic objects and or people in rural environments. A strong example of this is Sundown (1969), which depicts a solitary pumpkin in changing light, marking the end of summer in anticipation of a long and lonely winter. The pumpkin, a recurring subject in Andrew’s work, also represents Halloween, a holiday Andrew felt akin to because of his desire to hide himself in order to purely represent the world he observed.

The second significant event essential to understanding Andrew’s career could be better described as a period. For 15 years, Andrew intimately and secretly studied his neighbor Helga Testorf, producing nearly 250 pencil, dry brush, watercolor, and egg tempera pieces. He eventually revealed the body of work to his wife in 1985. Known as “The Helga Pictures,” the works studied light and subtle details on the woman’s physical landscape set against her surroundings. The drawing, Study for On Her Knees (1975) shows Wyeth’s creative process to produce what later became a wonderful, intimate portrait of Helga. Betsy, Andrew’s wife, and the most fervent supporter of his work, accepted the series, recognizing its value to Andrew’s oeuvre. Whitehead Station (1986) was painted while “The Helga Pictures” were being organized for their first public exhibition. The painting suggests the anxiety Wyeth may have felt regarding the revelation of this new distinct work to the public. The color white, symbolizing death, is repeatedly used and the alert dog looks in nervous anticipation in the same direction as long shadows cast on a distant hillside.

Jamie Wyeth (born July 6, 1946). Like his father Andrew, Jamie was the child cultivated and groomed to be a fine artist under his father’s tutelage. At age six, Jamie was removed from school to work alongside his father where he learned draftsmanship and painting. He has gravitated toward watercolor, mixed media, and oils – his grandfather N.C. Wyeth’s medium of choice. Jamie’s palette is brighter and more colorful than Andrew’s, which is similar to his grandfather N.C. Wyeth’s style. Jamie paints familiar places and intimate settings a long time tradition of the Wyeth Family.

N.C. Wyeth (October 22, 1882 – October 19, 1945) was one of America’s greatest illustrators, giving visual life to classic stories such as Treasure Island, Robin Hood and Robinson Crusoe. After being commissioned by the Saturday Evening Post to illustrate a western story in 1904, Howard Pyle, N.C.’s teacher, encouraged him to go west and directly experience the region. Heeding Pyle’s advice, N.C. spent a significant part of the next three years living out west, giving him plenty of dramatic folly for pieces like, I Hereby Pronounce Yuh Man and Wife! (1907) and The Prospector (1912). N.C. also decided to take advantage of the printing press’s newfound ability to produce more color, which explains this recognizable trait of his later paintings. That Endless Stream Across the Dubuque Ferry…, (1921) is a good example of how color became more prominent in his later canvases.

WOLF KAHN

Wolf Kahn: Refractions of Light, Paintings and Pastels presents the luminescent pastel and oil paintings from renowned colorist Wolf Kahn. Kahn came of age as a painter in New York during a time of tremendous artistic energy when Abstract Expressionism was gaining power in the international art community. In the mid 1950s Kahn emerged as a significant member of the Second Generation of the New York School and was part of a nucleus of artists working from life. Heavily influenced in his early work by his mentor Hans Hofmann, throughout his career Kahn’s Post-Abstract work remained grounded in representation while acknowledging and incorporating the formalist achievements of his colleagues. Converging color and light to create atmospheric and sensual pictorial fields, his paintings evoke the ethereal world of nature even when they are non-representational. Kahn’s paintings incorporate many of Hofmann’s principles of chromatic tension and movement, the palette of Matisse, Rothko’s sweeping bands of color, and the atmospheric qualities of American Impressionism. It is precisely this fusion of color, spontaneity and representation that has produced such a rich and expressive body of work spanning the second half of the 20th century and through today.
Born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1927, Wolf Kahn was sent to England with a group of refugee children at the outset of World War II, then at age 12 and moved to the United States to rejoin his family. After serving in the US Navy, Kahn studied under painter Hans Hofmann before attending the University of Chicago where he received his BA in 1951. Kahn has received many honors including a Fulbright Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His works are in the permanent collections of major museums, including the National Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

MILTON AVERY, RICHARD DIEBENKORN, HELEN FRANKENTHALER,  JOAN MITCHELL

Influences of Nature on Abstraction, celebrates the extraordinary impact that nature’s varying colors, light and line had on four influential artists of the 20th century: Milton Avery, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell. The selection of artworks highlights each artist’s distinct style and the unique way in which these artists responded to his or her natural surroundings. Uninhibited by the constraints of representational painting, these works reflect a concern about nature’s resonance on the human experience as communicated through the artists use of color, light, composition, and brush stroke. Painting in such geographically diverse areas as Nova Scotia, California, upstate New York, and Connecticut, these works convey a range of impressions from nature that are at once deeply sensitive and powerfully expressive.

Milton Avery (1885 – 1965), often thought of as America’s Matisse, is best known for his conflation of abstraction and representation using a rich and unusual palette.

Richard Diebenkorn’s (1922 – 1993) aerial landscapes of California illuminated the light and line of this area by marrying color field painting and geometric abstraction in a bold personal style.

Helen Frankenthaler (1928 – 2011), known as a color field painter and an abstract expressionist, utilized a technique known as “soak stain,” in which oil paints were diluted and painted onto unprimed canvas or paper, resulting in stunning and luminescent paintings.

Joan Mitchell’s (1925 – 1992) powerful and energetic brush stroke played out nature’s patterns, light, and depth, making her work some of the most spectacular of the Abstract Expressionists.