KEVIN FEY: Color Unbound

‘Color Unbound’ brings together the newest series of paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Kevin Fey. Fey’s paintings draw attention to the subjectivity of color, the action-based quality of painting, and the relationship between site and vision. The colors that one encounters in each painting are, in a sense, manufactured – their gradations forged through by the artist’s concentrated handling and knowledge of the material. Through pouring, heating, setting, and reheating, the weight of an applied color is captured by its darkened hue on the canvas, while lightness is recorded through negative space.

Caroll Taveras:

Photo Studio at Underline

A influential photographer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Wallpaper, and the New York Times Magazine, UNDERLINE artist Caroll Taveras brings her traveling ‘Photo Studio’ to the Gallery. From New York to London; California to Brazil; and back to New York, this project and installation will unfold over a series of weeks (and include limited slots for public portraits).

Taveras seeks to re-establish the small-town tradition of snapping locals on film in a studio environment, a practice popular in the first half of the 20th century and now almost non-existent.

Norwood & Underline Present

This exhibition of topical dreamscapes is an extension of Underline’s guest curatorial installation at Norwood arts club. The two distinct institutions have forged a connection across the thoroughfare of 14th street to probe themes of the fragility of the manmade, the overpowering force of the natural world, and the coexistence of the two within the metropolitan sphere.

image: “All New Construction” by David Opdyke

Opening Reception March 7: requests & RSVP to hello@underlinegallery.com 

Caroll Taveras is a Brooklyn-based Photographer, native New Yorker. She received her Bachelor of Arts from SUNY Purchase College where she came to photography while studying theater.  She was featured as one of ten Photographers in the 2006 International photography festival in Hyères. Caroll was also awarded first prize in the Px3 fine art competition in Paris. In addition to her own photography projects and editorial work Caroll also has been making collages for 16 years now and has gathered an extensive body of work which she recently self published in a book entitled “Surrender”. Her work has been featured in the Guardian weekend magazine, The New York Times T magazine, Wallpaper, Colors, Culture + Travel and Foto 8.

I Got the Whole World in my Hand, 2012, Photographs, paper, and leather on canvas.

Lia Porto is an Argentina-based artist who works in 2-D mixed media painting & collage.  Her work is influenced by travel & is characterized by a deceptively sophisticated brightness of color & light.  Works mainly on paper or on canvas have a complexity of  mark-making, diverse technical application of paint, and uniqueness of composition which takes the artwork beyond the realm of decorative abstraction and into the imaginary world of the artist’s mind.

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Artist Ellie Pyle has developed a strong ‘downtown’ collectorship for her vibrant, iconic paintings that frequently tout excessively available imagery culled from the most obvious sources. Despite her works’ elusive simplicity, her surfaces are “eloquent,” according to critic Geoff Young, “her distribution of information substantial, and her touch thoroughly felt.” Since completing her MFA at the Yale School of Art, Pyle’s surprisingly serious glitter paintings have exhibited widely, and continues to show in New York, most recently at Postmasters Gallery. Her various awards include the Norfolk Fellowship, the Sonesta International Materials Prize, the Marie Sharpe Foundation Studio Grant, and the Ralph Mayer Prize for Materials and Techniques.

Underline: What drew you to using glitter in your paintings, initally?

Ellie: As a student I was initially interested in and spent a lot of time studying classical materials like charcoal, oil paint and clay. At a certain point I started questioning this kind of vocabulary and began looking at what was going on around me more closely. I wanted to communicate differently and I didn’t want to use technical facility as a crutch. The price of something has nothing to do with art. The value to me has to do with the act of realizing the work, and the kind of personal and emotional necessity of being absorbed by the many small actions involved in their making. I became really involved with spray paint and sharpies. I was casting plastic bags in resin and stapling paper to the canvas. For a while there people were calling me “tape girl” because I was doing a lot of duct tape paintings. The color and movement of the city is an endless source of ideas for me. They were ephemeral, I liked that about them… eventually somehow glitter crept in and its been a number of years now. What can I say its sparkly. Also when painted over, it does something to the surface of the painting that is just lacking for me when its not there. I love it, and I am not over it yet. The alchemy of taking a totally accessible material and turning it into art, into something beautiful that moves people, this is so important to me. But the first glitter paintings were made on cave walls 30,000 years ago, its not like I am the first one.

U: The variable reflection of glitter as experienced only in person makes the paintings site-specific in many ways.  How is it further important that your art is experienced in-person?

E: There is an ongoing theme in my work that resists reproduction. In my lexicon the full reading of the art object can only be first-hand. There is a lightness you cannot read from a photograph, that in person those who are sensitive to this kind of thing are able to perceive. Further, the way they are hung, within the space of the gallery and in context of one another, these specific compositions happen only once and only last until the show comes down. In the catalog notes I described it as if it were a jazz chord. I think of it like a sentence in a poem where the paintings are the words. They all function on their own individually, but to see 30 at once is a whole other story, and there is a lot more room to move around in the kind of mental space that opens up. It is also why having shows is important to the work.

U: Considering the fluctuating value of gold, within the context of Underline’s exhibition, how do feel your artwork takes on extra-curatorial meaning as it hangs in MINE: Take What’s Yours?

E: The price of something has nothing to do with art. The value to me has to do with the act of realizing the work, and the kind of personal and emotional necessity of being absorbed by the many small actions involved in their making.

U: The white space in “Gold on White Tour Bus Painting” has a great proportional feel, while the gold glitter motif reads as an abstraction from a van decal, which captures the movement of the vehicle.  Does your work often discuss figure/ground relationships, static vs motion, etc & if so, how?

E: The color and movement of the city is an endless source of ideas for me. Can you see a Malevich on the side of a passing bus? I can. A friend of mine once described my work like it is a love-letter to my neighborhood. For me it is a conscious choice rooted in the desire to transform the visual events of my daily life into art. I want to reflect beauty. I want to use my work to talk about new ways of looking at the world.

“Ideas that were addressed by Ad Reinhardt and Walter Benjamin inform my work. Its refusal to be easily photographed and insistence on being seen in person urges the viewer to go and see the show in the actual gallery, not online. This work is like a jazz chord struck only once, hung this way only once, in the context of this show, in the context of this city.” –Ellie Pyle

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Born in Soviet Moscow to a world-renowned physicist and a notorious dissident mother who collected and exhibited illegal “Unofficial Soviet Art,” Marsha Owett was exposed to art at an early age. Owett and her family soon moved to St. Petersburg, then Leningrad, where her mother turned their small city apartment into illegal gallery and salon for painters, poets and other radicals. This led to the family’s eventual exile, and subsequent immigration to the United States when Owett was 10 years old.  Once in New York, she studied at The School of Visual Arts and had her first New York solo exhibition of paintings at the Roger Smith Gallery in 200 and her first solo photography exhibition at the New York Center For Photography And Moving Image, named Critics’ Pick by New York Magazine.

“I exaggerated the natural hue and glimmer on the water’s surface, and the rocks below, to evoke the sense of optimism I get from the unique golden light…”

“My paintings are all-over compositions defined by a bright palette infused with vibrancy and emotion. A form of action painting inspired by Abstract Expressionism, my method involves building up layers of paint and newsprint on wood panels, and then excavating those layers with an electric sander. The spontaneity of sanding produces unexpected results in each painting. My process is a mix of intuition and response to recognizable forms and current events; as I work into the panel, images and narratives start to reveal themselves to me—from monsters, butterflies to weather torn landscape. This excavation seems to set my subjects free.”  – Marsha Owett

Growing up in New Orleans, Melise Mestayer was exposed to a rich artistic culture that highly impacted her decision to become a visual artist. She completed a BFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York (2007) and an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design (2011). Melise currently resides in southern California where she maintains an active studio practice. Her abstract sculptures and installations — made from primarily reclaimed materials — have been in group and solo exhibitions throughout California and Louisiana. Her objects are included in both private and corporate collections, and she frequently creates commissioned artworks. She received a Board of Governor’s Fellowship, a Teaching Artist Fellowship through the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, and is currently a resident artist at the Beacon Arts Building. UNDERLINE Gallery’s “MINE: Take What’s Yours” is her first New York exhibition.

“Investigating notions of value and permanence, I utilize primarily found materials to create artworks that evoke natural forms … Living during a time of heightened eco-awareness, one must question how their own consumer indulgences aid in the decline of their surrounding environment.” –Melise Mestayer

Livia Marin is a London-based Chilean artist whose work has been characterized throughout by large-scale installations and the appropriation of mass-produced and consumer objects. Her work was initially informed by the immediate social and political context of Chile in the 1990s that amounted to a transition from a profoundly and overtly disciplinary regime (given by seventeen years of dictatorship) to one of an economically, though no less disciplinary, regime with a strongly developed neo-liberal economic agenda. Her work employs techniques and strategies that are characteristic of Sculpture, Installation and Process Art. Specifically, it employs everyday objects to inquire into the nature of how we relate to material objects in an era dominated by mass-production, standardization and global circulation. By appropriating mass-market objects her work seeks to offer a reflection on how we particularize our relation to them. She reflects on how, in a secular and materialist society, identities are increasingly designated through material tokens derived from consumerism. This significant, though often overlooked, aspect of contemporary life forms the field of her practice. Central to her work is a trope of estrangement that works to reverse an excess of familiarity engendered in the life of the everyday and by the dictates of the marketplace. Rather than the branded object of desire, Marin’s work focuses on what she has termed the ‘afterlife’ of objects in their domestic setting. Marin has exhibited widely both in her native Chile and internationally.

Underline: First off, your artwork consistently draws the eyes of high-profile gallerists & curators who visit the Underline. Do you imagine your work within the critical hierarchy of galleries & museums as you’re creating it? If so, how does that influence your personal point of view as an artist?

Livia: When I am immersed working, I never think about the impact that the work might or might not have with reference to any particular curatorial position in the visual arts. However, although I love doing what I do, I do not make the work for myself or only for my personal satisfaction; in this sense I only conceive the sense of a work of art when it is in some kind of relation with a given social context, human situation or mode of relation one may have or develop with the world. In this, when I work I try to connect or extend my own aesthetic experience (feeling and thinking) towards that of others: how others might receive the work and how could the work engage with its more immediate social context? Only later, I believe, the work has the possibility to engage with more specific and critical discourses within the context of art. To the extent that my work is conceived in relation to the other – to the polis, if you will, and, therefore, to the political, in its broadest sense – it works with questions of how demotic, aesthetic judgements are conceived: only then, institutional ones.

That ambiguity of the value assigned to things and the tension between discarding and repairing were important starting aspects of my project.

U: Your artist statement addresses the sameness of experience within the age of manufactured mass-market objects; your pieces describing the “afterlife” of these objects once they are placed within domestic ownership. Do you believe your artwork to also have an afterlife? If so, how would you describe it?

L: That’s a nice question. I do believe that the work has something like an afterlife, although I like to think of it more in terms of the work having ‘a life of its own’: when the work leaves the studio or its storage place and finds a place either in a museum, in a private collection or a public space for the sake of argument, it somehow stands on its own, and then, as an object, as a thing, has the possibility to circulate within the world of others.

U: It appears that your work remarks on the complacency of the general public, accepting the reality of standardization and global circulation. As a neo-liberal, do you find the effects of globalization detrimental to the quality of life in specific ways? If so, tell can you tell us how?

L: I would say that, for me and my practice, whatever my personal views, it is necessary to remain profoundly agnostic as to the value of standardized and mass-produced products. Part of the notion of an ‘afterlife’ of objects is that they become part and parcel of the social and emotional fabric of society: tokens variously of wealth, affection and esteem and so on. I suppose my work asks its public to look again or in some novel way at those objects; but what I do not want to do is imply any condescension or irony towards them. However, several recent works have looked at and incorporated various museal conservation and presentation practices. There is a rhetoric at work in the museum to denote these objects thus preserved and presented as elite, precious, unique: these are their ascriptions of value. Between them and the utterly banal consumer object there is an almost infinite range of branding and marketing exercises that imply a similar status to various consumer goods. So, I do not have some simplistic anti-materialistic stance; but rather to question how our interaction with objects moulds, informs or changes our values through aesthetic judgments.

U: How are gold & ceramic working together in your sculptures to enhance the artwork?

L: I was interested in the use of gold and ceramic objects in my artwork when I commenced a new project that evolved around the idea of broken things, i.e., of loss and care. Ceramic objects have that dual condition of being both lasting and utterly fragile; and I find fascinating the use of gold lacquer in the restoration of antique Asian ceramics. On the one hand, an object loses its value as a complete perfect object when broken, but on the other hand, when restored and completed with gold it gains a different though not inferior value. That ambiguity of the value assigned to things and the tension between discarding and repairing were important starting aspects of my project broken things.

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Riikka Latva-Somppi is a sculptor and glass artist living in Helsinki, Finland. Her work is at the interface of applied and contemporary art using glass as her main medium. Latva-Somppi got her MA from The University of Art and Design, Helsinki. She has also studied in Sheridan College, Ontario, Canada. Her work has been shown widely in Finland, Europe and North-America and she has work in various collections such as The State Art Collections of Finland, The Finnish Glass Museum, Jorvi Hospital and several private collections. The Foundation for Environmental Art (Finland) awarded her public art work Satakieli Näktergalen / Nightingale The Certificate of Honour for Environmental Art in 2009. Latva-Somppi is a member of Artists-O, Ornamo and an aspirant member of Association of Finnish Sculptors. She also works as a lecturer in Aalto University, curator and other assignments of expertise of her field.

The smallest moments of everyday are the ones we should note, value and enjoy.

“A spontaneous, indefinite form may be solidified in precious gold, often perceived as traditional and perfect, even holy. An everlasting slice of a glass apple as well as a real apple gilded in 22 K gold very slowly ages to reveal the passing of time. After the apple has dried away, a wrinkled golden form is left, like a forgotten memory that reaches the surface in a viewers mind.” – Riikka Latva-Somppi

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