Marie Schoeff, Traces at Jane Deering Gallery

New Show Combines Drawing and Printing in Unusual Ways

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

by CHARLES DONELAN

SANTA BARBARA INDEPENDENT

The loose and layered three-dimensional whorls at the heart of Marie Schoeff’s current work repeat a fundamental gesture that seeks to recapture the sensuality and integrity of the human body. Whether they refer to the female figure, to plants, flowers, and fruit, or to the shapely and sensuous mental spaces of intimacy, Schoeff’s marks only suggest specific images, remaining abstract, although they bear witness to the hand of the artist and the vicissitudes of the process and the media. From the evidence of this show, with its seven drypoint prints and dozen “trace drawings,” Schoeff has been very active with the press in the last two years. Many of the pieces on view have complex and vivid histories involving multiple encounters with plexiglass, ink, paper, and pressure.

The Trace Drawing series represents Schoeff’s original contribution to the history of the print, as they exist by virtue of a sequence of procedures that, in this combination at least, are wholly the artist’s own and that result in a two-sided art object that resists easy assimilation into known categories of print or drawing. Schoeff draws on the exposed side of a sheet of paper while the inked plexiglass plate sits below her drawing surface, marking the far side of the sheet. Then, when the print is pulled, what’s underneath shows up as a negative of the image on top, as the pressure of the drawing on the surface evacuates lines of white from the print below. There are also all kinds of incidental effects due to the presence of air bubbles and dust. This side of the drawing is the trace, and it provides a ghostly reminder of the double life that any image leads in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Courtesy Photo

“Coil-Fourth” (2011) is one of Marie Schoeff’s drypoint prints from the show Traces.

The results of this immersion in the printing process are uniformly satisfying and deep. Drypoints like “Mommy Long Legs” and the “Coils,” “Second,” and “Third” have the edgy intensity of black-and-white prints and the jazzy immediacy of ink-and-brush drawing. The delicious feathered edges of these sinuous lines are effects achieved at one remove from their source, having begun as the marks left in plexiglass by the passage of Schoeff’s etching tool, which is a hot soldering iron. Only later when the burrs created by this method of making incisions in the plastic are filled with ink do they flow on and into the paper, creating the slight fuzziness that gives these compositions their unique texture and added dimensionality.

Schoeff’s mastery of form comes out over and over again in the trace drawings, which are the show’s main attraction. These two-sided works reveal an aesthetic sensibility that’s equally at home with the organic and the mechanical, hatching a seemingly endless proliferation of self-englobed surfaces through the interaction of print, hand, and ink. In the sequence of trace drawings that begins with “Spinner” and goes through “Ghost Spinner,” “Duomo Duo,” and “Duomo Ghost,” Schoeff demonstrates the richness and intricacy of detail that becomes possible when these techniques are deployed in a kind of relay, where one print becomes the basis of the next, and so on. To really appreciate the exquisite balance and authority of these works, you really have to see them in person, where the play of surface and depth evoked by the artist’s draftsmanship becomes as one with the medium. Congratulations to the Jane Deering Gallery for kicking off 2012 with such a rewarding and elegant exhibit.

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Marie Schoeff’s Traces runs through January 29 at the Jane Deering Gallery, 128 East Canon Perdido Street.

ART REVIEW

Ghostly Echoes in Line and Thought - Marie Schoeff's intriguing, subtle exhibition in the new Jane Deering Gallery space deftly channels visual energy forces

BY JOSEF WOODARD, 

SANTA BARBARA NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT  . January 13 . 2012

MARIE SCHOEFF / TRACES

When: through Jan. 29 2012

Where: Jane Deering Gallery, 128 E. Canon Perdido St.

Gallery hours: 10am-5pm Tues-Sat; Sunday 1-4pm

Information: 966-3334, janedeeringgallery.com

Longtime Santa Barbara-based artist Marie Schoeff has been intriguing eyes and minds for many years, in various settings, including a pair of notable sightings last fall. She appeared in a selection of local artists' work from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art's permanent collection, and shortly thereafter as one of the wedded artists in focus in "Double Trouble: Married to Art and Each Other," a conceptual outing at Arts Fund Gallery.

But for a truer taste of Schoeff's recent work and aesthetic thinking, proceed to the Jane Deering Gallery, the impressive new art space on Canon Perdido (which locals may identify as situated between the defunct and beloved Jimmy's Oriental Gardens and the beloved and thriving Sojourner Café). Schoeff's current show, "TRACES," lays out the conceptual gist and the gestural uniqueness of a series of subtle, process-minded variations on the drawing/print theme.

Expanding on the implications of her show's title, "TRACES" involves multiple meanings of the "tracing" impulse. Schoeff has established a system of tracing visual and expressive impulses, often animated abstract linear bursts, as an aesthetic modus operandi. But she also uses a personalized technique of tracing and impacting from one drawing to other "ghostly" versions of the original.

Fittingly, Schoeff explains that her work deals with the elusive but undeniably pressing concerns of "absence, memory and loss," and that the impetus for much of the visual material rises out of the reality and symbolic portent of the female body, as a nurturing and transformative source.

While three denser-line dry point pieces hang on the back wall, in the "Coil" series, making an assertive visual impact — assertive, in terms relative to other art in the room — many of the other pieces here rely on a system of Plexiglass plates, ink and an original drawing, which tells only part of the story. Because of this doubling and echoing method, each piece on the wall contains a secret life, turned away from view.

As if to hint at the secret coding of the magician's trickery, however, two of the works have been situated in the middle of the gallery, revealing two sides of the art-making story. "Piggy Back" features a vaguely geological and/or anatomical form, extended further into an abstracted realm on the reverse. "Ghost Barbie" is an apparitional or ritual drawing of a female torso, floating in the ether of Schoeff's artistic determining.

Cheeky though the title "Ghost Barbie" may seem, Schoeff uses the term "ghost" in a freer way than we might initially infer, as a way of alluding to the morphing and transforming process at hand. Thus, we get "Spinner" and "Ghost Spinner" and "Duomo Dog" and "Duomo Ghost," as interrelated variations from the primal impulse of an original drawing.

As for the nature and evocation of the drawing impulses themselves, the artist works an effective line between control and chance — a combination evident in the art, as a whole. In "Plumb" and "Plumbless," a series of spirals, curlicues and rugged arabesques suggest both coiled intensity and gentle freehand invention. "Lasso" blends its squiggling lines into an almost figurative larger form, while "Rouleau de Fantome" could be read as poetic entrails and palimpsests.

Suffice to say, this body of work is very much a body of work-in-progress. With "TRACES," Schoeff seems less interested in the fixity or declarative aspect of a given image (which are often one half of a double image) than exploring a process of elaborating or deconstructing what we see. She is lured by the idea of ever-unfinished arrival.

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ART REVIEW : 

Tales of Topographical Notions - Jane Deering Gallery and the UCSB Art Museum have joined forces to present Phil Argent's intriguing exhibition 'Container Love'

BY JOSEF WOODARD, SANTA BARBARA NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT

October 21, 2011 12:01 PM

To attend to a bit of art scene housekeeping up front : there’s a new gallery in town, with a somewhat tangled root system, beaming with potential for enhancing Santa Barbara’s art scene.  The Jane Deering Gallery, run by the mostly Massachusetts-based gallerist who has maintained a gallery in Santa Barbara while here during winter months for a few years now, has relocated into a centralized, compact but resourcefully deployed space in the micro-climatic, hip zone by El Presidio, Three Pickles (in the ghost space of Jimmy’s Oriental Gardens) and the Sojourner Cafe.

This is an area where a gallery was waiting to happen, and now apparently has.  In the months when Deering is gone, the space will be a downtown satellite for the UCSB Art Museum, which has been dormant during a long reconstruction process, and in the process of changing its official name to the Art, Design and Architecture Museum, aka ADAM.

Completing the circle of circumstance allowing for the birth of this enticing new art space, Christi Westerhouse, the force behind the former gallery and now framing business Frameworks -- which has taken root in various locales literally around this very block over the years -- has set up shop in the back of the gallery space.  The pieces seem all in place for a new go-to spot about art.

All that said and more or less explained, it can be said the new space has commenced on solid ground with Container Love, an exhibition of recent work by Phil Argent, A British-born lecturer at UCSB who has shown in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere.  Some may find themselves lured into Argent’s distinctive aesthetic world after seeing a large-ish canvas as part of the current Santa Barbara Museum of Art show, View from Here: Santa Barbara Artists in the Permanent Collection.

As represented here by a fair cross-section of work from over the past decade, Argent is in command of a unique aesthetic and process, off in a personalized corner of the post-Conceptual painting world.  While appearing, at first blush, to be an odd coupling of abstract painting traditions with references to topography, cartography and mapping systems of all sorts, Argent’s art entails a merging of different elements.

Abstraction, of both the free-handed expressionist and cooler hard-edged sort, blends purposefully with the appearance and evidence of data in the picture.  Gestures of painting mix with allusions to computer processing and re-contextualizing of original art ‘source’ material.  What we see, in other words, is the result of what we get and what the artist has elaborately reworked and rethought, with the help of his computer and such physical toolkit items as an X-acto knife and masking tape.

Argent explains that the show title Container Love refers to his idea of the finished painting on a gallery wall as a ‘container,’ for content and also the process that leads him to that finished state.  For this artist, the initial act of creating a painting by hand is a first step, after which he analyzes and deconstructs the material with Photoshop, and then creates a new work through addition and subtraction, physically layering strips and cutting away areas on the canvas.

What results is a rewarding and also puzzling visual construct, with pieces cryptically missing and dense patches of painting action taken out of and put into new contexts.  Areas of visual activity play off of and resonate with curious white void spaces.  It all makes us ponder the painting process generally, and, specific to these pieces, the nature of what we see, and don’t see.

With the 2007 piece ‘Vista Kit,’ for instance, we get the sense of an exotic, semi-psychedelic landscape, with missing and/or migrated details, and fragments of geyser awe and fragility.  Across the room, ‘Untitled (Pass).’ from 2002, is a larger work with more of a modular structure and early 60s-esque curved lines, hinting at the life of decor and better living through circuitry.

And bringing it all home, on a couple of fronts, a painting from this year, in Argent’s life as a Goletan, another untitled piece presents a frazzled assembly of jagged-edged shapes, abutting an expanse of blue-green space.  To the locally absorbed among us, perhaps, the image reads like a re-imagined and revamped variation on an aerial map of the Santa Barbara coastline, nestled into a visually seductive and perplexing two-dimensional package ... or ‘container,’ as the case may be here.

With this intriguing show, a new-old space is up and running, and looking mighty good.

ART REVIEW

PHIL ARGENT : CONTAINER LOVE

When:  Through November 6, 2011

Where: ADAM/Jane Deering Gallery . 128 E. Canon Perdido Street 

Hours:  10am to 5pm Tuesday-Friday; 11am-3pm Saturday; closed Sunday and Monday

Information: 805-966-3334, janedeeringgallery.com

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ART REVIEW :   Color of a Different Color - With the final exhibition in its current El Paseo location, the Jane Deering Gallery presents a series of art in black, white, and shades between  

By JOSEF WOODARD, NEWS-PRESS CORESPONDENT 

May 20, 2011 12:33 PM

ACHROMATIC VARIATIONS

Shelley Reed . Arabian Oryx with Lilies (after Cozzaglio and Oudry and Marrell)   2008-201  .  Oil on canvas . 48-inch circle

 

Presently at the Jane Deering Gallery, only two paintings strategically occupy the back wall as you enter the space, making for a tantalized, caught eye and a cocked head.  Shelley Reed’s larger painting Arabian Oryx with Lilies (after Cozzaglio and Oudry and Marrell) is the showpiece on the wall and in the room, a round canvas with a heroic antlered animal and exotic blossom in the foreground.  A smaller square painting On a Branch (after Durant). 

As the titles suggest, Reed’s paintings are blessed with a certain old-worldly painterly approach and sumptuously rendered, but contain decided contemporary-minded gestures.  Not the least of these gestures is the assiduously limited palette : these paintings appear not in living color, as we know it, but with only black, gray and white doing their expressive bidding. It would be an almost ascetic conceit if not for the potency of the visual presence contained therein. 

The spare dramatics of this wall makes for a fine welcome to the affectingly strange and subtle group show ACHROMATIC VARIATIONS, the caveat for which is that the prevailing palette consists almost entirely of black, white and shades between (with few exceptions).  Partly because of the refreshing twist of artistic tradition, the exhibition comports itself with a cool, discreet charm, enhanced by the sense of artists working in a common cause, but in their utterly separate corners. 

Gail Pine, for instance, works in and with photography, in her own ‘found object’-ish and mysteriously manipulative way.  A standout at the recent “Small Images” show at Atkinson Gallery, Pine takes images from her photography collection and creates negative images, turning light to dark, diurnal to nocturnal and effectively turning reality inside out.

Her eight pieces in this show feel like parts of a whole, pieces in the puzzle of her expressive scheme.  Individual pieces contain extra strength, such as From His Birth, with a lone man on black (originally an image of a man on a bright, sandy beach), and the alluringly titled A Dim Remembered Story and At Noon of Night.  These are mystical images, half-real, half-conjured and evoking a peering into a parallel zone of consciousness.

 Gail Pine . From His Birth  2010 . Gelatin silver print . 7x5 inches . Ed.3

A very different story is at work in Ann Diener’s dizzily intricate, while also white space-aware drawings, as seen (and fondly remembered) at Edward Cella, CAF and the University Art Museum in recent years.  Her work here – with small dabs of color breaking with the curatorial code – resonates with a familiar balance of visual energies, its spidery lines and tangled structures and armatures inviting visions of inchoate chaos within orderly designs.

 

 

Ann Diener . Cathedral #4  2008 . Graphite, prismacolor, gouache, and cut paper on paper . 60x40 inches

 

 

 

Mary Heebner is an ever-intriguing artist who embraces change and dodges easily repetitive patterns in her work.  Here, Heebner shows Specere#2, an ink and pencil piece depicting abstracted plant matter, in a cagy science-meets-and-is-tweaked-by-art manner, on the palpable sensuous surface of Bhutan daphne paper.

 

Mary Heebner .  Specere #2  2011 . Archival pigment print, ink, pencil on Bhutan daphne paper . 39x25 inches

 

 

Conceptual twists take another turn or two in art by Linda Ekstrom, including the eerily nostalgic Her Dress, a chair draped with silk and a fleeting image of the artist’s own childhood dress, like an ephemeral blast from the past.  In looking for love, she has selectively erased text in book pages, stripping written language of its specific, inherent meaning while transforming it into the realm of visual art.  She toys with our love of letters and the now semi-endangered medium of books as revered objects.

 

Linda Ekstrom .  Her Dress  2004-2010   .  Silk, thread, wooden chair . 34h x 34d x 34w inches 

And needless to say, her work is strictly, proudly in black and white.

ACHROMATIC VARIATIONS is the last of five consecutive exhibitions this year in the wonderful present El Paseo location of the Jane Deering Gallery, which will go dormant until next year – or further notice.  Deering, based for most of the year in Massachusetts but a growing presence in Santa Barbara in recent years, has done more than her share to spice up the local gallery front, with a discerning eye and enigmatic elegance.

 

ART REVIEW

ACHROMATIC VARIATIONS

When:  Through Ma7 28

Where: Jane Deering Gallery . 25 E De la Guerra Street

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                            Vernacular Architecture Inspires Artist

 Duck Blinds

                                     Wednesday, April 13, 2011

by CHARLES DONELAN

Santa Barbara Independent

 

DUCKS, WATCH OUT: Over at the nearby Jane Deering Gallery (25 E. De la Guerra St.), photographer Nell Campbell explores an entirely different, yet strangely kindred, set of vernacular structures, the duck blinds of southwestern Louisiana. Campbell, who grew up amid the waterways in which these fascinating improvised small buildings are situated, is revered among Santa Barbara artists for her vivid images and the exemplary craft with which she prints them. These shots were taken from a small boat, but the effects are large and powerful. Composed of a wild mix of natural and manmade elements, including scrap wood, wire mesh, tree limbs, palmetto fronds, roseau cane, and river foliage, duck blinds serve to camouflage hunters as they sit quietly waiting for the arrival of their prey. Unlucky for ducks, the blinds nevertheless make brilliant found art objects, with their myriad idiosyncrasies and fortuitous displays of impromptu balance and improvised form. Campbell’s gorgeous prints are saturated with detail and create an absorbing experience out of each individual blind. Seen together, these funky secret shacks coalesce into something more, and more beautiful than any outsider could imagine. Congratulations to Campbell for going into their territory and bringing the blinds back so very alive. Duck Blinds: Louisiana is on view through April 30.

Calcasieu River and Watermelon Bay, Louisiana  2004

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ART REVIEW : The Secret Life of Greenhouses - Massachusetts-based photographer Esther Pullman finds great pleasure and coaxes almost surreal intrigue out of her multiple-image visions of the world inside greenhouses  

BY JOSEF WOODARD, NEWS-PRESS CORESPONDENT

 

March 25, 2011 7:36 AM

ESTHER PULLMAN : GREENHOUSES

When: through Saturday

Where: Jane Deering Gallery .  25 E. De la Guerra Street . Santa Barbara CA 

Reynolda House Greenhouse, Winston-Salem NC (rain) 2007 . Digital inkjet print . triptych 

As with many aspects of life (and social and cultural norms), when you pull back and look at something taken for granted, new ideas and realizations emerge.  Such is the practice of the artist, and such is the domain of photographer Esther Pullman’s distinctive and disarmingly meditative views of the world of greenhouses. What is for some a pragmatic microcosm for the care and nurturing of plant life is a world unto itself through this artist’s eye and lens, at once contemplative and slightly surreal. 

As seen in her exhibition now at Jane Deering, the Massachusetts-based Pullman has taken quite seriously the business of deconstructing and reconstructing the otherworld that is the greenhouse.  She savors the refractions of light and the variety of textures to be found inside these canned natural environments – from rusted metal to the soft or harsh feel of selected plants – and she both celebrates the structures and gently twists them, viewing them from multiple angles.

In this wisely sparse selection of her work from 2000 to 2007, laid out in the gallery with an attention to the visual ‘breathing room’ necessary for this work, Pullman comes across as someone with some firm ideals about where to take her art.  But, like a good portrait artist, she also boasts the necessary flexibility to keep the power of diversity in check, to find the expressive potential in each situation. 

Those situations have taken her far and wide, for the purpose of this show, from Massachusetts to North Carolina and also Santa Barbra County.  As for the local angles (“angles” being an operative word in her aesthetic), the works appear as distinct from the east coast counterparts in the room. 

A triptych from inside a greenhouse at the Santa Barbara Orchid Estate places the exotic flora in a more spotlighted, protagonist perspective than the other work in the show.   Meanwhile, the

 

Santa Barbara Orchid Estate, Santa Barbara CA   2006 . C-print . triptych 

Diptych of a commercial greenhouse in Carpinteria’s flower power zone by the polo field is the show’s most minimalist exercise, taking in the structure from outside rather than inside, as rhythmic structures clad in gray-silver-tarp encasings.

No doubt, the centerpiece of the show is also the oldest and boldest work, a five-panel view of an old urn-filled private greenhouse in Wellesley, Mass., which consumes one gallery wall and draws us into its seductive, oblique and time-twisting world.  Contrast, balance and imbalance work together between the five large images, which were shot at varied angles within the

Urns, Private Estate Greenhouse, Wellesley MA  2002 . Digital inkjet print . polytych of 5 panels 

Greenhouse’s tight quarters, making the space appear larger and more multi-faceted than it really is.  Rust and decayed urns indicate antiquity and disuse, the way of all flesh, while a hint of the warm, sunlit yard outdoors nods to the (relatively) imperturbable sweep of nature.

Another triptych, circa 2007, Reynolda House Greenhouse, Winston-Salem, North Carolina (rain), presents a harmonious but diversified blend of compositional  and textural features.  Between a prickly cactus in one image, the blurry rain-diffused window pane in another, and the weathered wood and diagonal lines in the third, some beautiful dialogue of disparity takes place.

Yet another different artistic agenda is at work in a larger but also more visually contiguous triptych in another corner of the gallery, identified as Allendale Farm Greenhouse, Brookline, MA (Pullman’s titles are deceptively lucid and descriptive of the “where” of her subjects, although she is quick to revise our sense of place). 

In this duskily lovely work, wooden slats in the foreground create a grounding for the real meat of the imagery, the taut, translucent plastic acting as “window” panes.  The plastic lends the life beyond – the fuzzy contours of autumn-lit terrain outside – a kind of painterly blur.

Allendale Farm Greenhouse, Brookline MA  2003 . C-print . triptych 

Implicit in the artistic equation in this triptych, and Pullman’s work more generally, is an intriguing inside-outside duality, inherent in the secret life of greenhouses.  In her carefully wrought impressions of that special world, the realms of art, nature and human inquiry meet.

ART REVIEW

ESTHER PULLMAN :  g r e e n h o u s e s

When:  Through March 26

Where: Jane Deering Gallery . 25 E De la Guerra Street

Hours:  11am to 5pm Tuesday through Saturday, by appointment Sundays and Mondays

Information: janedeeringgallery.com

http://www.newspress.com/Top/Article/article.jsp?Section=SCENE&ID=566112948532150347

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ART REVIEW : Art Going Wide - In the second exhibition in the inviting, small - and temporary - new Jane Deering Gallery space, the overview goes wide

BY JOSEF WOODARD, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT 

February 11, 2011 12:00 AM

'MMULTIPLES'

When: through Feb. 26

Where: Jane Deering Gallery, 25 E. De la Guerra St. 

Wayne McCall . Shelf Series, Timeline 2010 . ultrachrome print . 16x44 inches 

For exhibition No.2 in the inviting, small and temporary new quarters of Jane Deering Gallery, the lens zooms out from a singular point of focus to a wide frame.  Last month, the gallery featured the focused and quietly poetic work of Korean-American photographer Youngsuk Suh.  This show, on the other hand, is dubbed “MMultiples,” and includes assorted media, artists from different shores, and a general situation of multiple artistic choices. 

Abundant though the show’s overview may be, some kind of cohesion keeps the show from flying apart into conceptual excess.  Somehow, the disparate art hangs and stands well together. 

In part, that aesthetic flow can be traced to the central sensibility of Deering, and to the discerning eye of the gallerist and curator.  In addition, there are thematic threads, including art made in multiples, as well as art from scrap. 

While many of the artists in the show hail from the U.K. and the East Coast, two are familiar Santa Barbara favorites, Wayne McCall and Joan Tanner.  McCall – a unique fine art photographer who has also worked in art, commercial and industrial photography – offers a suitable introduction to the show by the front door, with the crisp color image Grande Salon, Annotated.   The ‘salon’ in question is his Montecito living room, thickly populated with art, books, objets d’art and objets de whatever, to which the artist has added selective and half-wry annotated texts to identify sources and influences. 

Making a resonant cross-talk connection with McCall’s detailed imagery, photographer Dana Salvo shows detail-dizzied large color prints, basking in the density of Mexican personal shrines.  The images attest to the devotion to detail and to the faith behind these in-home shrines, while suturing the eye and mind, on purely visual terms. 

McCall also shows a few from his ‘shelf series’ with objects on a flat platform, including small, wrapped sculptural pieces by Tanner.  This leads our eye naturally to Tanner’s two standing sculptures in the room.  She is a masterful magician, deft at transforming quotidian materials and ‘stuff’ into sculptures of self-logical grace and surreal humor, as seen once again in her works Youcanbuilditthere and Trophy Podium. 

Joan Tanner . Trophy Podium  2011 . mixed media 

Works like these may have descendent links to ‘junk sculpture’ of old, but they transcend that flip, funky-ism and become something grander.    Trophy Podium, for example, is a quixotic quirk of a creation, with plywood, green glass, twisted wire and large rusty screws in the material mix, but conveying a spirit of unexpected stateliness amidst the ruins.

Speaking of odd materials put to good, and also fastidious, artistic use, Rachel Perry Welty’s Fruit Sticker Drawings are created from minutely cut and elongated stickers from fruit.  Welty uses this sticker sinew as her material for ‘drawing’ in loopy tendrils on waves of white. 

Meanwhile, Rana Begum’s almost vertiginous candy-colored relief boxes are made from assiduously cut and contrasted shades of vinyl tape, seizing the eye with both minimalist precision and giddy overkill, and relishing the contradiction.  The same visual theme continues in her larger, flatter silk screen works.

Rana Begum . Untitled  2006 pair of silk screens and Box Construction #85 2004 

More of a sense of hands-on and at least semi-traditional art-making are to be found in the two pastel pieces of Juni Van Dyke, from her square-format 10x10 series, working in a distinctive gray area between the abstract and the pictorial. 

A sense of the hand’s on work is also very much evident in the drawings and monotypes of Geoffrey Bayliss, one of the few artists whose works are on view in boxes rather than the wall or floor.  Bayliss’ simple drawing style and natural rustic eye for organic line hint at the influence of Twombly and Guston.

Photography being a fundamental element in the Deering Gallery stable, several intriguing photographers are also seen here.  In color, Christina Seely shows her urbanscape series, with cities and city lights viewed voyeuristically from peripheral outposts, and Neeta Madahar’s Flora series – a fantasy staging with women festooned with flowers of their choice – buzzes with kitschy sensuality and genuine beauty.

 

Neeta Madahar . Suky with Cherry 2010 . Hand C-print

40x30 inches and 16x12 inches 

Sterner stuff, expressively speaking comes through in the black-and-white work of Paul Cary Goldberg’s fragile yet formidable platinum prints.  His mortality-meets-time work is called Recent Reflections.  Steve Rosenthal’s’ own ‘multiples’ in this mix draw on religion, in the form of dreamily elegant black-and-white images of vintage rural churches in New England. 

In short, this show goes wide in style and substance.  But it gets away with it, thanks to overall strength of the work and sometimes surprising alliances and affinities bouncing around the space. 

 

ART REVIEW 

MMULTIPLES

When : Through Feb. 26

Where: Jane Deering Gallery . 25 E. De la Guerra Street

Hours: Tuesday-Saturday  11am-5pm .  Sundays & Mondays by appointment

janedeeringgallery.com

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Contemporary Photographs by YoungSuk SuhCalm in the Landscape on View at Jane Deering Gallery
Monday, January 17, 2011by ELIZABETH SCHWYZER 

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE: If you didn’t know it going in, it might take you a few minutes to figure out the theme of Youngsuk Suh’s most recent series of photographs. There’s a foreboding silence in these hazy Californian landscapes and architectural spaces—a sense of something just out of sight. What they share, in fact, is a filter of smoke.

The series, now on view at Jane Deering Gallery (25 E. De la Guerra St.), is Calm in the Landscape: Wildfires & Wilderness. In it, the artist records the California brush fires of 2008 and 2009. Yet fire itself is strangely absent from these scenes. Instead of sweeping vistas of blazing hillsides or heroic close-ups of ash-smeared firefighters, Suh shoots from a middle distance, capturing the disconcerting way that life goes on, even in the midst of disaster.

In “Campers,” a shaft of light descends from the heavens like something out of a Constable painting, while in the distance, smoke rises from the gas grill beside a pop-up camper. The forested scene is almost bucolic, but for the yellowish sky. The same goes for “Bathing,” in which Suh turns again to European art historical traditions. Here, the tiny figure in question casts a dark reflection in the lake where he wades, while the sun appears as a pale disk, burning through the smoke. The nominal subjects of “Bather and a Dog” are so dwarfed by the landscape around them they’re not apparent at first. Instead, the eye is drawn up and out of the trees to the bridge that spans the river valley, its struts showing dimly through a haze of ash.

“Sunset I” (2009) . Archival pigment print by Youngsuk Suh.

These are chilling scenes, especially for those who have witnessed wildfire close-at-hand and who know all too well what it’s like to see familiar places threatened or transformed by disaster. The overwhelming immensity of such a threat comes through in “Firefighters,” where tiny figures huddle in a clearing, their hose appearing from the distance like a delicate, colorful thread.

In most of these large-scale prints, Suh has digitally altered the color, pumping up his greens to super-saturated emerald. In the very architectural “Gas Station,” he commands the focus by dropping the spectrum almost to grayscale, so that the colorful logo on the gas pump pops dramatically. This is a place designed for human use, but it’s totally unpopulated, and the smoky stillness settling over field and road is frighteningly anaerobic.

Also on view in the gallery are a number of images from Suh’s previous series, Instant Traveler, focusing on National Parks and the shifting place of the wilderness in American consciousness as wild places become increasingly accessible. Among these works is “Badlands,” a painterly triptych in which South Dakota’s strikingly eroded buttes ripple across three frames. On the cliffs in the foreground stand Mennonite women in bonnets and long skirts, one kneeling to shoot a picture. In another frame, a video camera sits alone atop a dusty spire, its lens facing the parking lot.

Deering is in Santa Barbara through April and will be displaying one show of contemporary work each month until that time. For more on the gallery, call (917) 902-4359 or emailinfo@janedeeringgallery.com. 

http://www.independent.com/news/2011/jan/17/contemporary-photographs-youngsuk-suh/

 

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ART REVIEW : Natural and Unnatural Angles - Jane Deering Gallery has set up shop in town for a few months, opening with a poetic show by Korean photographer Youngsuk Suh  

BY JOSEF WOODARD, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT 

January 7, 2011 12:00 AM

'CALM IN THE LANDSCAPE: WILDFIRES & WILDERNESS'

When: Through Jan. 31

Where: Jane Deering Gallery, 25 E De la Guerra Street . Santa Barbara CA 93101 

Sunset I 2009 . archival pigment print . 36x46 inches 

Jane Deering is a name that has drifted in and out of Santa Barbara’s contemporary art scene over the past few years.  Deering, a gallerist in her home turf of Massachusetts for most of the year, has relocated to Santa Barbara for the winters, opening her home as a gallery for a couple seasons, last year excluded.  She has made a bold impression with the caliber and conceptual intrigue of the contemporary art she represents. 

Suddenly, this winter, Deering has set up shop in an official downtown gallery space, taking over the wonderful former location of Patty Look Lewis Gallery.  For the first of a few exhibitions in the space, Jane Deering Gallery offers a strong and poetic show of definitively large but inherently subtle color photographs by the impressive and somehow painterly Korean-American photographer Youngsuk Suh. 

Some will remember Suh’s work from a companion show to the fairly landmark Korean color photography blockbuster,  “Chaotic Harmony,” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 2009.  For the most part, this gallery show focuses on the work the photographer calls his “Wildfire” series.  Although these images were mostly shot around wildfires in Northern California, close to where Suh lives and teaches, the concept and pictures will likely trigger strong emotions for Santa Barbarans, in the wake of the spate of three destructive fires in the area from 2008 to 2009. 

In fact, Suh’s fire focus comes lined with ulterior expressive agendas.  While elements of peril and destruction are implicit in the art, he seems more in pursuit of a new, personal landscape art sensibility, using the ambient smoke as a softening agent and a filter on the realities before him.   Reality, too, is subject to slight alterations, given the photographer’s post-exposure manipulations of image and color. 

In these strangely seductive images, taken with a large format camera and printed on epic-scaled rag paper, layers of smoke serve as hazy muting effects and give the scenes a more varied visual density.  Peculiar inclusions of human activity in the mostly natural settings – usually only faintly visible footnotes – also add to the intrigue of the pictures. 

Waterskiing 2009 . archival pigment print . 36x46 inches

In “Waterskiing,” a boat and skier are ghostly faint on a smoke-covered lake, in which a crisply colored area of trees and land in the composition appears extra-real in context.  With “Firefighters,” the figures of the title are tiny, barely noticeable yellow blips, features in a carefully plotted composition that is vivid and green on the bottom, dematerializing into ever-grayer haze in the top half of the pictorial space. 

Nature assumes a different character in Suh’s dryly witty “Gas Station,” with its disarmingly subtle gradation of whites and gray tones, to a vaguely dreamy degree.  A wink of humor appears in the inflatable, wind-machine-blown apparition and the contrasting burst of lucid focus on a gas pump.  Ironically enough, it all happens in an idealized nature scene. 

Gas Station 2009 . archival pigment print . 36x46 inches 

From Suh’s earlier “Instant Traveler” series – posing questions about the prefab nature of nature encounters in the age of National Parks – we find the quietly commanding triptych “Badlands,” also slyly manipulated in the digital darkroom.  Here, he achieves an effect both ruggedly bleak (even including a few incidental Mennonite tourists for “local color”) and naturally majestic.  This is a masterful display of the artist’s technical powers, unique vision and investigative way with color, texture and balance on multiple levels.

With this calm but powerful show, the news is out.  Thankfully, Jane Deering Gallery is back among the art-hungry, at least for a fleeting time frame. 

ART REVIEW

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CALM IN THE LANDSCAPE : WILDFIRES & WILDERNESS

When:  Through January 31

Where: Jane Deering Gallery . 25 E De la Guerra Street

Hours:  11am to 5pm Tuesday through Saturday, by appointment Sundays and Mondays

Information: janedeeringgallery.com 

http://www.newspress.com/Top/Article/article.jsp?Section=SCENE&ID=566067765476214204