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Grid List - the artists |
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Grid List explores the influence of the grid on artists. We trace back the source of geometric abstraction past Albers and LeWitt to a more personal and direct place. Nature, music and sports are just a few of the square wellsprings these artists draw their right angles from.
The exhibition was conceived in January 2011, when Patrick Morrissey contacted me via Facebook. We became fast friends and the Grid List grew naturally. Four artists are from London, one from Atlanta, one from Detroit and ten from New York City. Four of the artists have shown at Minus Space Gallery (Schifano, Francis, Ethier, Peterson) and four hold MFAs from Cranbrook’s Painting Dept. (Mathews, Rex, Thomason, Sengbusch). Peterson, Mathews, and Sengbusch met in 1997 at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit where they studied under Joseph Bernard.
Thus the threads of the Grid List entwine. We hope to present a new take on Geometric Abstraction with a focus on the individual artists’ idiosyncratic relationship with the grid.
In addition to the artists in the show, there will be "non-a examples of the grid (i.e. a live spider and its web, a loom, a Nintendo (Tetris), photos of the grid in cave art (Lascaux) and a stone or crystal. These are non-circuitous correlations between the grid in nature, pre-history, technology and the artist’s mind.
Grid List will travel to New York City after Detroit. Allegra LaViola, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, will host Grid List NYC in its project space, opening March 14.
Mark Sengbusch
About the organizers:
Mark Sengbusch received his MFA in painting from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2008. His work has been equally influenced by early video games like Tetris, and by ancient Peruvian weavings. From 1997- 2007 Sengbusch was an active member of the Detroit art scene and curated numerous shows. Sengbusch lives and works in New York City.
Patrick Morrissey is a reductive artist working in London as part of a two-man collective with Hanz Hancock. Together they have curated an ongoing series of exhibitions focusing on their genre. Saturation Point is an international survey of contemporary reductive art. Morrissey attended Goldsmiths College in South London where he achieved an honours degree in Fine Art. He was born in South London and grew up there. Whilst at Goldsmiths, he developed an interest in sculpture and installation work. Film also played a role in his practice at that time. His interest in film as object originated from his childhood fascination with film and the phenomenon of projected imagery and light.
About the artists.
Stacy Fisher was born in Norwalk, OH in 1974 and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She studied sculpture at the Cleveland Institute of Art and The Ohio State University, as well as the University of Central England. Her work has been shown at Horton Gallery, the Bronx River Art Center, Cleopatra’s, Nudashank, and Art Blog Art Blog, among other venues. Whether her work is entirely abstract or loosely based on function, scale, form, and placement are key factors. Pedestals are unusually low, works on the wall are off-kilter, and groups of related object huddle together or spread out on the floor. Fisher's work is familiar without being recognizable, and visually activated through the way it remains still. She has had recent group shows at Thierry Goldberg Projects and Mixed Greens.
Joseph Bernard, First of 5 Port Chester, NY to Bridgeport, CT projects and schooling polio guitar BSA 650 painting janitor trucker construction factories encyclopedias married USAR art schools SCSC U of Hartford Art Chicago SAIC Detroit CCS filmmaking MoMA DIA 130 exhibitions 40 years teaching divorce lung cancer twice open heart photography collage painting Caucasian hetero vegetarian atheist.
Paul Corio is a painter who lives and works in New York City. After a long career in commercial art he returned to school, earning a master's degree in painting from Hunter College. While at Hunter, he studied with George Hofmann, Sanford Wurmfeld, Valerie Jaudon, and Vincent Longo, all of whom helped to develop his approach to color and abstraction. Corio is a part-time faculty member at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. He is also a jazz musician and an avid horseplayer.
Linda Francis has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts (CAPS Grant). Her paintings and drawings are included in the collections of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Denmark, Nordjyullands Kunstmuseum, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Rogalund Kunstmuseum, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Sarah Moody Gallery of Art / University of Alabama, Portland Museum of Art, Schlumberger Collection, Equitable Collection, and Philip Morris Collection. Her work has been discussed by critics including Tiffany Bell, David Shapiro, Yve-Alain Bois, Ken Johnson, Michael Brennan, and Ben La Rocco, in publications such as Flash Art, Arts, Artforum, Art Press, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Artnet Magazine, Art in America, Artcritical.com, and The New York Times. "Spirals, curves and the complex symmetries and structures underlying motion have been the basis of most of my work," says Francis. Critic Yve-Alain Bois writes in his catalog essay for a previous exhibition at William Paterson University, that Francis "marvel[s] at science as a vast reservoir of improbable data."
Painter Nate Ethier was born in Providence in 1977. He studied in the Black Mountain tradition at a small college in rural Vermont and continued his formal education at Boston University under the tutelage of John Walker. A resident of New York since 2005, his work is represented by Lenore Gray (Providence) and Minus Space (Brooklyn).
Tracy Thomason was born in Gaithersburg, Maryland and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New
York. She has participated recently in a solo exhibition with Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery in Philadelphia,
PA, a two-person exhibition with Nudashank Gallery at the MDW Fair in Chicago, IL, and a three-person
exhibition at James Fuentes Gallery in New York, NY. She received her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook
Academy of Art in Michigan in 2008 and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in
2006. She has given lectures at Cranbrook Academy of Art and the University of Knoxville, TN. Tracy is a
fourth-generation female artist.
David E. Peterson David E. Peterson (b. 1979) is an abstract painter who has exhibited his work
throughout the United States, Argentina and Europe. His work is included in the collections of the
Museum of New Art (Detroit), Progressive Art Collection, Bilzin and Sumberg, Home Depot, Related
Group, among many others. His work has been profiled on Forbes.com, Loft Magazine, Southern Living,
CNN and Detroit Free Press. David holds a BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI. He
lives and works in Atlanta, GA.
Allie Rex lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, she received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2002, and her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2004. Using Mylar, paint, ink, pencils, vinyl and pins, she constructs 3-dimensional installations of patterns, colors and shapes on the wall. Her work has been shown at various galleries and institutions in New York and throughout the U.S., including: Like the Spice Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; the Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY; the Salina Art Center, Salina, Kansas; Goutier College Rosenberg Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland; the Daimler Chrysler Collection, Auburn Hills, Michigan; Cranbrook Museum of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; Wayne State University Community Arts Gallery, Detroit, Michigan; School 33 Art Center, Baltimore, Maryland; Byron C. Cohen Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri; and the Kansas Memorial Union Gallery, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas.
Karen Schifano is a painter/sculptor with a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She received a BA in Art History from Swarthmore College and an MFA in Painting from Hunter College. Her work has been shown recently at Blank Space Art and the McKenzie Gallery in Chelsea, was included in "Minus Space", curated by Phong Bui at PS1/MoMA, as well as in many other international exhibitions, most recently at ParisCONCRET. She was also recently asked to join the 30/30 Image Archive Project created by CCNOA, Brussels, which will periodically travel as a small group show. Works on paper are included in the Minus Space and Pierogi Gallery flat files, and paintings are included online on minusspace.com, geoform.net and structuralmadness.com. Karen has also been employed as a painting restorer at Simon Parkes Art Conservation for over twenty-five years, and enjoys her work!
Hanz Hancock was originally involved in music and performance work, and as such did not receive any formal artistic training. His work as a musician was very much rooted in the experimental/ avant-garde and punk movement of the late 70s/80s. This influenced his art making, which was a secondary activity. The emphasis in his creative motivation shifted in more recent years, and upon meeting Morrissey, his art became more formal, or reductive. He fully acknowledges that he owes an artistic debt to Morrissey for his having pointed him in the path of concrete methodology, and showing the limitless potential this genre has to offer in terms of developing ones work and ideas. Hancock does not rule out any future exploration or experimentation in relation to his practice, and has indicated that future work may re-invoke the theatrical, performance, or installation based themes with which his output has hitherto been involved.
Ian Swanson received his BFA from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. He works in a variety of media and through a number of methods; including painting, sound, sculpture, video, installation, and performance based projects. From 2009-2011, he helped found and run a number of artist-run galleries and initiatives in the city of Detroit. He has and continues to exhibit regularly regionally and nationally, and this summer will be appearing in the Midwest Edition of New American Paintings. He also performs extensively with numerous experimental audio and musical projects in both individual and collaborative capacities. Swanson is presently pursuing his MFA in Painting at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. He is represented in Southeastern Michigan by Re:View Contemporary Gallery.
Jeffrey Scott Matthews has recently exhibited in Heavy Metal Sunburn at Jolie Laide Gallery in Philadelphia, Improbable Self: Notes from the Void at St. Cecilia's Convent, Brooklyn, and in Neon Rainbow at French Neon, New York, New York. Mathews received his MFA from Cranbrook and currently lives, works, writes and plays music in Brooklyn.
Francis Farmer makes experimental work concerned with the changes in identity construction and communication brought into play by new mass media technologies. Recent shows include Vanishing Point at Elevator Gallery, Hackney, London, UK, Cash Converters in This Is Not A Gateway Festival of Urban Studies, Spitalfields, London, UK and Pornography & New Media In The 21st Century at the Museum of New Art, Detroit USA. Francis Farmer was born in 1966. and lives and works in the UK. |