Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art presents "Dennis McNulty: When One of Your Own..."
Dates:
Thu Jun 07, 2007 00:00 - Fri May 04, 2007
Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art is pleased to present new work by Dennis McNulty, a San Francisco-based artist whose work explores his Southern roots.
McNulty comes from the barrier islands that hug the Atlantic shore, an area marked by its creole heritage. He describes these islands as “dominated by iconic Southern imagery and ideologies,” and his installations recreate that atmosphere.
McNulty’s paintings draw upon a deep reservoir of Southern vernacular visual culture, one that has proved fertile in American art. Walker Evans and William Eggleston both mapped the region’s distinctive iconography, and traces of that vocabulary surface in Jasper Johns’s paintings. By choosing to work with a distinctively Southern iconography, McNulty continues this lineage in American art. His work can be difficult and haunting, fraught with history, but it also contains wit and humor.
McNulty’s image of the South is complicated and often contradictory: “Baptist, Presbyterian, and Catholic churches on nearly every corner, pre-1800s architecture intertwined with old live-oak trees, Spanish moss, shrimp boats, black-only neighborhoods, white-only neighborhoods…” McNulty’s disturbing “Black” faces (mask-like faces rendered in a style reminiscent of early-twentieth-century painted signs) reference this “segregated and separate” environment.
A wooden shack serves as the exhibition’s focal point. McNulty uses the shack to draw together disparate moments. He believes that the gallery’s white walls undermine the works, and prefers to present complete installations where “the viewer can piece the drawings and paintings into a story.”
McNulty holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a BFA from the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. He has exhibited widely in San Francisco, including the 111 Minna, Southern Exposure, Upper Playground, Hespe, and Canvas galleries. This is his first solo exhibition.
For more information, please visit: http://www.wolfecontemporary.com
To view images of McNulty's work, visit: http://www.dennismcnultyart.com
McNulty comes from the barrier islands that hug the Atlantic shore, an area marked by its creole heritage. He describes these islands as “dominated by iconic Southern imagery and ideologies,” and his installations recreate that atmosphere.
McNulty’s paintings draw upon a deep reservoir of Southern vernacular visual culture, one that has proved fertile in American art. Walker Evans and William Eggleston both mapped the region’s distinctive iconography, and traces of that vocabulary surface in Jasper Johns’s paintings. By choosing to work with a distinctively Southern iconography, McNulty continues this lineage in American art. His work can be difficult and haunting, fraught with history, but it also contains wit and humor.
McNulty’s image of the South is complicated and often contradictory: “Baptist, Presbyterian, and Catholic churches on nearly every corner, pre-1800s architecture intertwined with old live-oak trees, Spanish moss, shrimp boats, black-only neighborhoods, white-only neighborhoods…” McNulty’s disturbing “Black” faces (mask-like faces rendered in a style reminiscent of early-twentieth-century painted signs) reference this “segregated and separate” environment.
A wooden shack serves as the exhibition’s focal point. McNulty uses the shack to draw together disparate moments. He believes that the gallery’s white walls undermine the works, and prefers to present complete installations where “the viewer can piece the drawings and paintings into a story.”
McNulty holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a BFA from the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. He has exhibited widely in San Francisco, including the 111 Minna, Southern Exposure, Upper Playground, Hespe, and Canvas galleries. This is his first solo exhibition.
For more information, please visit: http://www.wolfecontemporary.com
To view images of McNulty's work, visit: http://www.dennismcnultyart.com
Ajna Lichau & Jessica Pezalla
Dates:
Thu Apr 05, 2007 00:00 - Wed Feb 28, 2007
Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art is pleased to present new work by two Bay Area artists, Ajna Lichau and Jessica Pezalla.
Ajna Lichau uses video, photography, and mixed-media to create atmospheric installations that explore the body’s relationship with its environment. Her most recent work, centered on the cameo, continues exploring issues of physicality, sexuality, and sensuality. Jessica Pezalla employs simple materials (paper, felt, coated wire) to build sculptures and installations that function as waterless aquariums that “connect the natural world to the domestic.”
Pezalla and Lichau have created site-specific installations for the current show. Though the artists have chosen to work independently, their works share formal and thematic concerns. Both artists play with temporality, change, and metamorphosis, engaging the physical body—as a surface, as an object of scrutiny or fascination—as a means to examine the problems, and properties, of observation.
Lichau’s video works transform the cameo from a static (and passive) aesthetic object, into an unstable temporal experience. Pezalla’s work asks viewers to confront our tendency to equate “truth” with “nature,” by creating objects that are at once “naturalistic” in their organic beauty and “artificial” in their construction.
Lichau and Pezalla first met in the MFA program at the San Francisco Arts Institute. This is their first two-person show together. Born in Montreal, Canada, Jessica Pezalla received her BA from Oberlin College, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Pezalla has held solo exhibitions in San Francisco and North Adams, Massachusetts. She has participated in group shows at the Lola Gallery, the Luggage Store Annex, and the Swell Gallery. Ajna Lichau received her BFA from the Parsons School of Design, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has held solo exhibitions at Spur Projects (Portola Valley, California), and participated in group exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art, the 9th Havana Biennial (Cuba), and the Art Point Black gallery in Florence, Italy. She was selected to participate in the 2005 GenArt: Emerge exhibition.
Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art
49 Geary Street, Suite 200
San Francisco, CA 94108
Ajna Lichau uses video, photography, and mixed-media to create atmospheric installations that explore the body’s relationship with its environment. Her most recent work, centered on the cameo, continues exploring issues of physicality, sexuality, and sensuality. Jessica Pezalla employs simple materials (paper, felt, coated wire) to build sculptures and installations that function as waterless aquariums that “connect the natural world to the domestic.”
Pezalla and Lichau have created site-specific installations for the current show. Though the artists have chosen to work independently, their works share formal and thematic concerns. Both artists play with temporality, change, and metamorphosis, engaging the physical body—as a surface, as an object of scrutiny or fascination—as a means to examine the problems, and properties, of observation.
Lichau’s video works transform the cameo from a static (and passive) aesthetic object, into an unstable temporal experience. Pezalla’s work asks viewers to confront our tendency to equate “truth” with “nature,” by creating objects that are at once “naturalistic” in their organic beauty and “artificial” in their construction.
Lichau and Pezalla first met in the MFA program at the San Francisco Arts Institute. This is their first two-person show together. Born in Montreal, Canada, Jessica Pezalla received her BA from Oberlin College, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Pezalla has held solo exhibitions in San Francisco and North Adams, Massachusetts. She has participated in group shows at the Lola Gallery, the Luggage Store Annex, and the Swell Gallery. Ajna Lichau received her BFA from the Parsons School of Design, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has held solo exhibitions at Spur Projects (Portola Valley, California), and participated in group exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art, the 9th Havana Biennial (Cuba), and the Art Point Black gallery in Florence, Italy. She was selected to participate in the 2005 GenArt: Emerge exhibition.
Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art
49 Geary Street, Suite 200
San Francisco, CA 94108
"Jeremy Mora: Sculpture"
Dates:
Thu Feb 01, 2007 00:00 - Mon Jan 29, 2007
Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art presents "Jeremy Mora: Sculpture," February 1st through March 23rd, 2007.
49 Geary Street, Suite 200
San Francisco, CA 94108
Mora, a Los-Angeles-based sculptor, creates miniature landscapes using humble materials. Mora draws inspiration from bonsai, dollhouses, dioramas, and architectural models, objects united, according to the artist, by their status as idealized miniature environments, where humans can exert “complete control” over nature. Mora’s vignettes push viewers to approach the landscape, not as a natural phenomenon of sublime grandeur, but as a cultural phenomenon, a place suffused with history.
An Arizona native, Mora graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. Since his graduation, Mora has lived and worked in downtown Los Angeles. Mora has been in group exhibitions in Chicago and Los Angeles, and was recently featured at Pulse Miami (2006). In 2006, Mora held his first solo exhibition at the Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, California.
A reception for the artist will be held on Thursday, Feb. 1, 2007.
For more information, please visit: http://www.wolfecontemporary.com
49 Geary Street, Suite 200
San Francisco, CA 94108
Mora, a Los-Angeles-based sculptor, creates miniature landscapes using humble materials. Mora draws inspiration from bonsai, dollhouses, dioramas, and architectural models, objects united, according to the artist, by their status as idealized miniature environments, where humans can exert “complete control” over nature. Mora’s vignettes push viewers to approach the landscape, not as a natural phenomenon of sublime grandeur, but as a cultural phenomenon, a place suffused with history.
An Arizona native, Mora graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. Since his graduation, Mora has lived and worked in downtown Los Angeles. Mora has been in group exhibitions in Chicago and Los Angeles, and was recently featured at Pulse Miami (2006). In 2006, Mora held his first solo exhibition at the Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, California.
A reception for the artist will be held on Thursday, Feb. 1, 2007.
For more information, please visit: http://www.wolfecontemporary.com
