Framed Reality
December 2-January 31, 2009
Gallery Talk: 6 pm, Friday, December 12 / Reception, 7 pm
Framed Reality, an exhibition featuring the work of four figurative painters who draw inspiration from various sources, including childhood memories, folklore, and narrative. Although distinctly different in their approach and painting styles, each artist’s work will evoke a unique and highly personal response from viewers. Participating artists include: Daniel Finch, Brian Martin, Becky Slemmons, and Nora Sturges.
Daniel Finch appropriates popular imagery from his formative teenage years growing up in the 1970’s to create paintings that reflect on past memories as observed from a current perspective. His large scale works represent modern archetypal characters and events with historic or mythical relevance created by joining pixilated painting segments to reveal such familiar icons as King Kong, Evel Knievel and Bruce Lee. Finch comments, “my paintings are, in great part, a search for the remnants of masculine identity transmitted to me through the media icons of my generation.”
Brian Martin’s paintings are based on memories of growing up in several suburban neighborhoods throughout America. The artist’s perception of these communities as cold and isolated is sharply contrasted to the safe and supportive paradigm intended by these planned neighborhoods. This sentiment is conveyed in the striking paintings he constructs of empty playgrounds and vacant hallways. Martin remarks, “the disparity between this ideal and the actual experience of life in these communities is the focus of my art.”
Becky Slemmons is a narrative painter whose outlet for storytelling is realized through creating art. She says, “the stories we tell, our mythologies, are metaphors for what matters to us, distilled from our experience of being human.” Her most recent work was inspired by folklore and lesser-known customs in which the artist searches for truths throughout multiple cultures. This work draws from a seventeenth century Welsh courting ritual of spoon-giving, which the artist has adapted to incorporate tales of her own invention based on this custom. In order to bring her characters to life in her paintings, Slemmons must fully understand them, often writing down stories, making their costumes and shooting video for reference. This highly personal experience allows the artist to see how each of her fictitious characters might feel in the situations with which they are confronted. Working from video stills, Slemmons captures key cinematic moments to depict in her paintings and in her storytelling.
Nora Sturges’ detailed paintings place contemporary figures in historical period settings. Her rich, small paintings are often inspired by narrative, and are filled with details that exemplify the artist’s whimsical humor, bringing an interesting perspective to imaginary events and situations. In Marco Polo’s Travels, Sturges creates a series of paintings of imaginary adventures which was originally inspired by the narrative and subject matter of Italo Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities. “The paintings have since grown to encompass personal experience of travel and displacement, as well as ideas taken from the actual Travels of Marco Polo, a book with many contemporary parallels.” Also included in the exhibition is the series, A View from the Road, paintings that represent travel snapshots depicting the memorable and less than memorable things tourists see and choose to document while traveling. Quiet Cities is the third series that will be exhibited, inspired partly by the artist living in Baltimore, it “explores the human inhabitation of the environment and the process of urban growth and decline.”