Our newest exhibition, Color and Pattern, in our main gallery space features the work of three dynamic mid-career artists from around the US: photographer, Raissa Venables (Vermont), and painters, Marcus Cain (Kansas City, MO), and Eric Sall (Tulsa, OK). The three are contemporaries in the art world, friends, and graduates of the Kansas City Art Institute.
The combined works of Venables, Cain and Sall provide a stunning exhibition of artwork which balances beautiful forms of saturated color punctuated by decisively controlled and rhythmic patterns. Although each artist approaches from very different starting places, there are unexpected and delightful visual intersections among the work they produce, which becomes apparent as these works are displayed together.
Color and Pattern will be on display through February 23, 2019.
About the artists in Color and Pattern:
Raissa Venables’ visceral images are composed through a process that requires numerous photographs of each place. These images provide experiential visions of our environments, in this case interior visions, whether mundane or opulent. At first glance they seem to be realistic images or even entrances into existing places – which they are. But upon further investigation, how could these spaces exist? A surreal and magical narrative unfolds with unpredictable nuances, rhythms, distortions, twists and turns, all without a human presence. The result is both an architectural puzzle and a landscape of the mind.
Resisting the hyperactive world, the abstract paintings of Marcus Cain are constructed images of the narrow delay between sight and perception. Employing organizing “lines” with pieces of wood dipped in paint, he “stamps” onto the surface of his panels, hundreds or thousands of individual marks of different colors. These incremental stitches of paint weave color - layer upon layer in such ways as to induce a semi-meditative state of contemplation as one gazes upon the tactile paintings. These paintings invite multiple views whether it is to see the hard edged individual lines, the spaces between, or the overall effect of depth.
Eric Sall’s abstract paintings acknowledge both the endless scale of the prairie or vast beauty of the empty desert, or reference patterns and designs found in more urban environments. Both street culture and the natural environment with all its grand vistas play a huge part of his upbringing and inspiration. His paintings in Color and Pattern have striped areas as either a central theme or sparsely located sometimes icing thick, and gestural marks of long broad strokes. Compare Venables “Bedouin Tent” to Sall’s “Bebop Legend”, both with their stripes and gestural execution.
We invite you to visit the exhibition in person. See the colors and patterns float on the surfaces and extend into the depths.