Four Summer Shows Not to be Missed

Four Summer Shows Not to be Missed!

If you are in Santa Fe, Los Angeles, or London please take time to see four breathtaking exhibitions by Steve Dennie, Vernon Fisher, Trenton Doyle Hancock, and 

Nic Nicosia:

James Kelly Contemporary is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Steve Dennie entitled Volume Two. This exhibition will be the gallery's first for Dennie.

The exhibition will consist of 25 black and white photographs from his 2015 series called Volume Two, which comes directly from his recently published two catalogues set, Volume One and Volume Two.

Dennie is a street photographer, but not in the usual sense of the term. Instead of photographing people interacting in urban locations, he photographs the familiar outdoor locations he encounters on a daily basis, which do not include people, just the environments. This intentional absence of human life in the work helps evoke the emotional response he is looking for.

The artist states:

“Since 2013 I have been documenting the changes in my everyday landscape. What attracts me is the visually mundane and how it transforms itself into the formal elements of a photograph by blurring the lines between the esthetics of painting and photography.

In general, each location is scouted for weeks, with information recorded in a journal regarding the best time to photograph at each location. The use of line and space creates a common visual esthetic that weaves its way throughout the images giving the photographs cohesiveness.”

This clear esthetic, and absence of the human presence, is Dennie’s hallmark and gives the photographs in the Volume Two series its elegant cohesiveness.

Steve Dennie was born in 1954 in Dallas, TX, where he currently lives and works. Dennie received a B.F.A. in 1979 from the University of North Texas.

Dennie has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including the Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX; San Antonio Art Institute, San Antonio, TX; New Orleans Museum, New Orleans, LA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Hallwalls Gallery, Buffalo, NY; and Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA. 

Opening Reception: June 18, 7-9pm 

On View June 18 – July 18 2015 

Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to present “Vernon Fisher: A Retrospective," curated by Hugh Davies – Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (CA). For nearly forty-five years, Fisher has been creating innovative mixed media works that reckon with disjointed streams of consciousness and push the boundaries of post-modernism. Having exhibited widely since the late 1970s, this retrospective presents hallmark works from various stages in Fisher’s career, and highlights his preoccupation with archive, information transmission, memory, and taxonomy.

Drawing upon his early interest in how people make sense of the world, Fisher weaves together literary references, pop cultural imagery, and cartography with his own symbolic lexicon. Renouncing the convention of a singular or autonomous narrative, his works imply a seemingly endless metonymic chain. Hugh Davies first saw Fisher's work in the late seventies and was immediately impressed with the combination of conceptual rigor, and consummate craftsmanship. Davies, along with co-curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, organized a mid-career retrospective of Fisher’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 1989. In the accompanying catalogue essay, critic Dave Hickey stated that Fisher works in a kind of formula of “imperfectly analogous juxtapositions of three imperfectly distinct kinds of phenomena (the personal, the social, the natural), described by three imperfectly distinct information systems (the literary narrative, the iconographic image, and the cartographic grid).” In viewing various works made over time, these “imperfectly analogous juxtapositions” begin to form their own story, revealing Fisher’s expertise in creating a unique and elusive narrative with a comic’s sensibility. 

Vernon Fisher (b. 1943, Texas) has been included in two Whitney Biennials (most recently in 2000). Museum installations include the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Hirshhorn Museum (D.C.), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (IL). Major public collections include: Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, (NY), Art Institute of Chicago (IL), Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Dallas Museum of Art (TX), Denver Art Museum (CO), Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis (MN), High Museum of Art, Atlanta (GA), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (TX), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (IL), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX), Museum of Modern Art (NY), Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Phoenix Art Museum (AZ), San Antonio Museum of Art (TX), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (CA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NY), Tucson Museum of Art, (AZ), Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (MN). The artist lives and works in Fort Worth, TX.

Private View: Friday 22 May, 6-8:30pm

Trenton Doyle Hancock in Conversation with Zoe Whitley: Tuesday 19 May, 7pm 

Hales Gallery is delighted to announce I Want to Be at the Meeting After the Separation, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with renowned American artist Trenton Doyle Hancock. Hancock has exhibited widely across North America and in other countries in Europe and Asia, but I Want to Be at the Meeting After the Separation will be Hancock’s first major solo exhibition in London.

Trenton Doyle Hancock has, since childhood, been interested in issues of morality and ethics. He grew up in an all American household governed by Christian ideals and over a lifetime has developed his own parallel (sometimes contradictory) value system incorporating his love of toys and the narratives played out by comic book characters. What began simply in his youth necessitated by a desire to manage a seemingly endless amount of resources, questions and life information, has continued as a grand narrative into adult life, pulling in a deepening understanding of life's thematic complexities, current events and existential conundrums which have come to form the complex narrative basis for Hancock’s paintings, drawings, murals, theatrical performances and film. This, combined with constant inspiration drawn from classical comic book imagery, pop art and American cinema (especially the horror genre), as well as the aesthetic of classic prints (Durer, Goya, Daumier, Kathe Kollwitz, etc.), creates Hancock’s unique approach to collaged painting. 

I Want to Be at the Meeting After the Separation takes its title from a verse in a popular gospel hymn often performed in American Baptist churches. Like many of the titles Hancock uses, I Want to Be at the Meeting After the Separation has a personal history for the artist: the hymn was introduced to his local congregation by Hancock’s late grandmother and was also a favourite of his step-father’s, a minister in the local parish. I Want To Be at the Meeting After the Separation will feature a number of new paintings, part of Hancock’s ongoing grand saga portraying the birth, death, afterlife and dream-like states of a range of characters, particularly the Mounds (half-animal, half-plant like creatures) and their aggressors, the Vegans. The new body of work, however, is described by Hancock as “a new beginning” and shifts the storyline by preparing ground for the introduction of a series of new characters.

In the new paintings the two opposing forces – Loid (the being with stark, paternal energy) and Painter (the being with colourful, lenient, maternal energy), both recurring characters in Hancock’s previous works – are re-joined having been separated early on in Hancock’s narrative, around 50,000 years ago. As Loid is characteristically known for his use of black and white, and Painter by her colour-coded signature, Hancock’s merger of the two has created a new unified being named "Ploid". Hancock imagines their merger causing an upset in the atmospheric balance set out in the previous storyline and the three large paintings in the exhibition – I Want to Be at the Meeting After the Separation, Referee, and I Know Just How You Feel – illustrate the moments of adjustment as our eyes attempt to focus and our brains try to decide where one being stops and the other begins. The three paintings also set out and describe the conditions which make the smaller paintings in the exhibition. These smaller works each represent a skewed path branching off from these larger pieces. The new monumental works set the stage for the imminent debut of Ploid (the being that unites Painter and Loid), Betto (Ploid’s nemesis), Torpedoboy (Ploid’s son and an incarnation of Hancock himself), UNDOM ENDGLE (the long lost reincarnation of Ploid’s daughter), Junior (Torpedoboy’s and Undom’s child that is destined to save the world) and others. I Want to Be at the Meeting After the Separation is a new beginning, an entrance way into a new dramatic turn in Hancock’s narrative. 

"Private situations, thoughts, and emotions directed the concepts of the art in this show. The sculptural props, drawings, and other materials needed to realize the concepts in these photographs were fabricated or gathered within the studio and now exist as stand-alone objects separate from the photographs.

Although the art does originate from personal experience, I have always preferred simply to present the picture, drawing or object directly to the viewer. Thus allowing the viewer to decipher or complete the story based on their emotions and experiences."

Increasingly in his work, Nicosia has pulled back the curtain to reveal some of the workings behind his photographs. In this exhibition, he will be showing some of the sculptures that he created as props for these photographs. Showing his props is a continuing process for him, and this will be the second exhibition at the gallery where he has agreed to show these sculptures.

Also, Nicosia will show a group of unique small-scale drawings displayed in a grid, and will be the first time he has shown a series of drawings on paper.

Nicosia will also create a unique large-scale wall drawing for the exhibition. He will make the drawing using a large-scale graphite pencil.

Nic Nicosia was born in 1951 in Dallas, TX, and currently lives in Santa Fe, NM.

In addition to being a photographer, Nicosia received a BS in Radio-TV- Film from the University of North Texas and has made several films throughout his career. 

Lisa Brown Consulting