Open Range

Group exhibition Curated by Augusto Arbizo and Sima Familant Marsha Cottrell Benjamin Edwards Dan Hays Caitlin Masley Douglas Melini

 

Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery is pleased to present a thematic group exhibition titled, Open Range, curated by Augusto Arbizo & Sima Familant on view from February 25 through March 20, 2004.

Open Range brings together the work of five emerging artists whose work addresses formal and conceptual ideas of fragmentation, accumulation, and layering. Dazzling and brilliant in execution, the works thoughtfully call attention to the accelerated contemporary visual world, both representational and abstracted. The works range from the fractured landscapes of Dan Hays and Benjamin Edwards, and the chromatically dense and patterned works of Doug Mellini, to the utopian kaleidoscopes of Caitlin Masley's photographs and the elegantly rendered works on paper by Marsha Cottrell.

Brooklyn based Cottrell digitally alters word processing characters – commas, colons, brackets, and dashes - to create dense allover abstractions. These punctuation marks are fragmented and stretched into hair-thin lines which serve as rich material for atmospheric and crystalline images digitally output as unique iris prints.

Edwards’s paintings distill countless logos and symbols of consumer culture into multi-layered landscapes. Each of the Washington DC based artist’s paintings is based on a plotted road-trip that he has taken. On these trips, Edwards digitally logs selected consumer locations that he then devises to structure and compose paintings which comment on contemporary American culture.

Conceptually specific, the London based painter Dan Hays discovered his source material for constructing labor intensive paintings by contacting a person with his same name who had posted images of the Colorado mountainscape on the internet. The artist then inverted the image compositionally and tonally to accentuate the ornamental and aesthetic qualities of the mechanical reproduction, obsessively articulating each pixel in oil paint. While the paintings seemingly mimic digital processing techniques, they belie the careful precision of the artist's brush.

Bright and aggressive, Melini merges design and abstraction, composing distinct arrangements of patterns to alter and influence the way we see color and decipher imagery. With a nod towards places such as Times Square, the paintings create a visual density and articulate a culture overwhelmed with optical choices. These ideas are worked out through painting directly on the canvas denying the expected application of a computer.

Masley's project is concerned with the architecture of the city - the works examine Paris, Baghdad, Berlin and Rio - and how these decisions inform the current politics and bring to light the subversive forces lurking beneath the facades. Masley manipulates, distorts, reconstructs and plays with the order and chaos implicit in each of the images.