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For over 40 years, folk artist Kent Twitchell has shared with the people of Los Angeles artwork in the form of large-scale murals several stories tall with photorealistic precision of people he most admires.

People pass by his painted murals decade after decade admiring his work. His work is a time capsule that lasts not long before his work gets destroyed by the weather, taggers, and building owners that want to change the colorful walls and Twitchell’s work is forever gone. This is the case of the Freeway Lady, 1974 (the first ever Freeway mural in the United States) and Ed Ruscha mural, 1978, which are now in the process of being replaced.

It is urgent that better preservation keep alive this legendary work that has transformed many people’s attitudes by exposing them to art, spurring minds to notice and wonder, and inspiring other artists to follow in their own self inspired pursuits. As Twichell explains

“It’s so much bigger than life. I so much want other people to appreciate them the way I do that it helps me get through the work, because it’s not necessarily exciting, it’s not process, it’s hard, so painting people I really like makes it a lot easier.”

The process of creation, restoration, and recreation seems a never-ending task in keeping pure the originating romantic notion of this artist. The sources for such great passion are remarkable and we feel as obliged as he does to share his interests and talents with all.

Euphema Robinson, Pocomania, 40″x 46″

Curated by Euphema Robinson and Leah Hamilton

In honor of Black History Month, Limner gallery presents “Histories.”  A group exhibition of select New York City and Upstate African American artists. The participating artists in Histories represent a colorful gamut of media ranging from photographers, painters, sculptors and graphic artists. The artists in Histories relate not just culturally, but emotionally, reflecting both the personal history of the individual artist and the collective spirit of African Americans–the dynamic history of their perseverance and ever-evolving presence in American History.

Among the New York City artists selected is Barron Claiborne, a self taught and highly collected photographer. His work explores historical, mythological and symbolic imagery. Laurie Lyons, a notable documentary photographer who has captured the spirit of America through her continuing series “Flag.” Surrealist painter Ajamu Kojo Chioke Walker, his art, “like truth, creeps through the illusions of the world.” Illustrator and fine artist Jennifer Crute, her finely rendered large-scale oils are soulful and intense.

Among the upstate artists is Jamaican born Euphema Robinson. Euphema’s oil pastels are inspired by memory; the colors and emotionality of her characters evoke a distant, tropical world. Kianja Strobert, her conceptual painting and sculpture is inspired by language - the paradox of linguistic form. Reggie Madison and Earl Swanigan exhibit raw, brutish and forceful paintings. Reggie’s paintings infer a sophisticated and urban Afro-centric tradition; Earl is a true primitive, painting folksy characters floating on simple painted, fabric or found object backgrounds.

The Limner Gallery will be open during the exhibition for public viewing Wednesday to Saturday from 12-5. Other times by appointment.

Reception, February 7, 4-6pm

Limner Gallery
123 Warren Street
Hudson, NY 12534
Phone: 518-828-2343
Web: http://www.limnergallery.com

William Furlong has worked with the recorded voice since the early 1970’s, when he established Audio Arts Magazine on audiocassette.

For this project, the artist presents 4 sound frames and four graphic works.
He has always been fascinated with the recording process, how it can make soundings in the discourses of art, and be used to inform and disseminate creative activity.

In this series of new works, Furlong abstracts words and phrases from original interviews with artists, transferring them to four ’sound frames’. Each sound frame contains twelve loud speakers from which orchestrated and choreographed sequences of fragmented speech are interwoven and layered into rhythmic, resonant and allusive sound-scenes.

On occasions, these abstract constructions imply the possibility of a conversation, but lack any ‘before and after’ narrative. The actual meanings of what is being said goes into and out of focus, like fragments of encounters barely over-heard, snatches from conversations that might have been or might still occur.

It is a kind of orchestration of voices, not a presentation (with complications) of attitudes or arguments. Layering, repetition, rhythm, abstraction: a kind of music, but not melodic. A recognition that the antiphonal music of human voices can (as in Joyce) transform into pure sound that is expressive of human beings, rather then human assertion.  The art of the piece itself counters the discourse from which the fragments are abstracted! (Mel Gooding 2008)

A SERIES OF FOUR LISTENING DEVICES & SOUND SCORES

FRAME 1    I Remember Having a Conversation with Liam Gillick
FRAME 2    Why am I Making it?
FRAME 3    When you go into an Art Gallery, it’s Always Full of Air
FRAME 4    It depends on how it is we think the structure of meaning works

A new series of sound works constructed from recorded interviews made as Furlong’s participation in ‘Intelligence, New British Art 2000′, Tate Gallery.

Featuring the voices of:
Susan Hiller, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Hilary Lloyd, Graham Gussin, Mark Lewis, Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane, Martin Creed, Yinka Shonibare, Bob & Roberta Smith, Bridget Lowe, Richard Wright, Julian Opie, Tacita Dean, Jaki Irvine, Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé, Michael Craig-Martin, Gillian Wearing, Sarah Lucas, Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane, William Furlong.

Laure Genillard
2 Hanway Place
London W1T 1HB
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7323 6523
Web: www.lauregenillard.com

Harry Holland is widely regarded as one of Britain’s best craftsmen, producing technically brilliant and very beautiful paintings. His style is distinctive and immediately recognisable, something which every artist seeks. The paintings are suggestive in the sense that they imply situations, events, or relationships that are not directly expressed; this imbues them with an engaging sense of mystery. A master of painting, Holland works with uncompromising commitment and sincerity to produce art that is intense and rewarding.

Holland was born in Glasgow in 1941. He trained at St. Martin’s School of Art from 1965-69. Since the seventies this extraordinary classical artist has had over thirty solo exhibitions and figured in countless group exhibitions worldwide. Not surprisingly, his work has developed a substantial international following amongst collectors and has found its way into numerous important public collections world-wide including the Tate Gallery, British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, National Museum of Wales, National Portrait Gallery Canada, Welsh Arts Council, European Parliament Collection, Belgian National Collection and the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge.

Albemarle Gallery
49 Albemarle Street
London W1S 4JR
Phone: 0207 499 1616
Web: www.albemarlegallery.com

My career began some forty years ago. The early paintings were abstracts but the work always had a sense of landscape about it. The paintings turned toward realism and a fascination for the sea at a conjunction of events in the early 70’s I quit my career as a graphic designer, spent two summers in Newfoundland and inherited a single reflex camera.

The camera captures my specific responses to the drama and complexity of the sea. It’s a compositional tool, a way of gathering detailed visual information. Film stops the continuous motion of the water allowing me to unravel the complex layers of design and it turns light into two dimensional patterns, a phenomenon that has led me to this group of paintings Acts of Light.

I am intentionally ignorant regarding the technical aspects of photography. It is not my goal to make a perfect photograph, which I can then copy into a painted image. As a painter I have learned that photographs are deceptive, providing either too much or too little information, often of a contradictory nature. The creative method involves manipulating that information by adding or subtracting or by combining two or more images. It’s also a refining process that shapes a personal wonderment into a clearer, more powerful statement.

I put photographs through several generations, from small colour prints to larger laser prints to 35mm slides, but not necessarily in that order. Each random change alters the image and its colour relationships giving hints as to what might be incorporated into the actual painting.

One further aspect is the most important and that is the act of dismissing the photographs entirely. At a certain point the painting is turned against the studio wall while I work on others. The piece is reviewed a week or a month later. The photographs have been forgotten and a more personal and deeper expression begins to emerge.

Like many of us, I watch the degradation and destruction of the environment with growing alarm. We are quite possibly living in the twilight of the natural world as we have known it. In that regard, my work is an act of preservation. To preserve the natural world is to preserve a language. It’s the language of the wind and shifting light, of stillness, silence and space. It allows us to converse with the other voices, the voices of our true aspirations, our regrets, our hopes.

My journey as an artist began in my mid teens. I recently came across a quotation that explains what I have actually been doing for all this time. It’s by the legendary Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. “Art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder”.

Albemarle Gallery
49 Albemarle Street
London W1S 4JR
Phone: 0207 499 1616
Web: www.albemarlegallery.com

Cinemage is an audio-visual or cinematic project started by Aki Onda in 2005. Cinemage means “images for cinema,” or “homage for cinema.” Performances are composed of slide projections of still photographs and guitar improvisation.

The visual images in Cinemage are snapshots taken from Onda’s daily life. He applies similar methods developed from his work as a composer, particularly his ongoing project Cassette Memories, in which he plays field-recordings which he made as a sound diary. By documenting fragments of his personal life, something is revealed in their accumulation. The meanings of the original events are stripped of their significance, exposing the architecture and essence of memory.

Although most photographers slice out a single moment in time to render an image as absolute, Onda’s photographic images consist of a moment within a movement. The sensibility is essentially filmic. The photos are more like moving images than stills and the style is similar to Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Projected on a screen, the images have the familiarity of an out-of-focus memory and evoke a feeling of déjà vu.

On this occasion, Loren Conners plays guitar along with Onda’s visuals.

The performance will last approximately one hour. Admission is eight dollars, with all proceeds going to the performers.

Lisa Cooley
34 Orchard Street
New York, New York 10002
frontdesk@lisa-cooley.com
Phone: 212 680 0564
Web: www.lisa-cooley.com

Janice Nowinski is still talking to the masters and she has much to say. From a tete a tete with Boucher in the closet to a rousing romp with Ruben’s Three Graces. She has guided and prodded us to make painterly connections that are both traditional yet forward looking. Many surprises and discoveries have been made along the way. This showing of Ms Nowinski’s at the Bowery gallery, furthers and deepens many of her past investigations, yet a new arena of query emerges.

An imposing African American man occupies the center picture plane like a mountain in a late Cezanne or a Goya portrait figure of Josefa Wanasbrok at the Met. The contemporaneity of this painting and its unconcealed sexuality, solidly places it in the 21st century.

Ms Nowinski turns her gaze inward and rewards us with self portraits, still lifes and tender renditions of friends and family that are both clinically precise and unnerving in their willingness to take huge emotional and painterly chances. We are privileged to have her share such work and discovery with us.

Janice Nowinski has an M.F.A. from Yale University. She has exhibited at the Bowery Gallery, The National Academy of Design, NY, The First Street Gallery, NY, and the MCS Gallery, Easton, PA

Bowery Gallery
530 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
Phone: 6462306655
Web: www.bowerygallery.org

Labauvie’s hand cut and forged steel sculptures — although abstract, evoke organic shape, elusive human figures and natural forms. An assemblage of “calligraphic” lines and thicker masses, the sculptures frequently stand on three points; they seem at once fragile, in constant movement, and solidly grounded, as if frozen in time. Labauvie explains this paradox: “A turning point is defined by this indefinite time of potential before a process is complete. The sculpture’s momentum is cyclical; from line to volume and back again through the line. Within this cycle, the viewer becomes an actor; part of its creation. When the energy of the formal movement is completed, the white space takes over and the intellectual dynamic begins”. In his drawings, Labauvie explores the same tension between line and volume, between positive and negative space.

Living in Tampa, FL, since 1998, Dominique Labauvie was born in Strasbourg, France in 1948. He studied literature, philosophy and art history at the University of Strasbourg before deciding to become a sculptor. In 1987, Labauvie entered the prestigious Gallery Maeght with which he had eight acclaimed solo exhibitions and published several catalogues. His work is part of numerous public and private collections, among which the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL, Runnymede Sculpture Park, Woodside, CA, the Museum of Decorative Arts, Paris, France, the National Collection of Contemporary Art, Paris, France, the Public Collection of Contemporary Art of the City of Paris, France, the Fondation Maeght, St. Paul, France. Labauvie has been commissioned to create more than a dozen monumental sculptures for both private collectors and public art projects in France and in the US.

Haim Chanin Fine Arts
121 West 19th Street
10th Floor
New York, NY 10011
Phone: 646 230 7200
Web: www.haimchanin.com

Perla Krauze’s paintings and objects are in the realm of the emotional and rational, the real and the artificial. Her cast resin stones suspended from grid seem to escape gravity and emanate an incredible peacefulness.

The artificial stones in various heights and colors on open steel tower transmit the feeling of equilibrium. In the paintings we see traces, scratches and at the same time the layers underneath shine through, so that nothing is hidden.

Her principal concerns as an artist involve time and memory - the effect which the passage of time has upon natural material and upon man-made objects, including works of art, as well as the effect of time upon the memory of what one has seen and experienced. Integral to this ongoing investigation is the exploration and use of dualities, dichotomies, and opposites. “I work with the contrast between, or coexistence of, the rational and the intuitive  -  between the permanent and the ephemeral  -  the natural  and the artificial  -  and  the physical and the spiritual.”

In her paintings, she places emphasis on the physical nature of her materials and on revealing the actual process of making the painting. For example,  nails and staples  -  occasionally even a section of the wood stretcher  -   remain visible, to become part of the visual language of the work.

Ms Krauze received a Master in Fine Arts degree in 1993 from Chelsea College of Art in London, following studies at Goldsmith’s College of London University and at the National University (ENAP) in Mexico City. She has been exhibiting her work publicly since 1983 and has had solo exhibitions at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City and at Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Oaxaca.

Howard Scott Gallery
529 W. 20th, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10011
Phone: 646 486 7004
Web: www.howardscottgallery.com

Using art as a way of charting aspects of the universe is not a new idea. Neolithic stone carvings documented star charts and marks on wood or stone from ancient times documented the varied topographies, sacred and profane, of the planet.

What the two artists in this exhibition have in common is that they use the material means of art making to chart and explore immaterial phenomena. In the case of Kosek this is nothing more than the immediate moment of temporal existence and all things in this ever-present moment happen simultaneously, which he, in his own mindset, feels he is causing. The charts are documenting his tremendous affect upon the world. He specifically believes he can control the weather of the world and influence personal and political events. In the case of Cha, we see her meditations on the corporeal and non-corporeal effects on the human body of events like growth, injury, disease and healing.

Kosek uses small scraps of paper for his maps, which he intricately and elaborately covers with words and symbols in highly activated gestural compositions. He does this to lay out phrases of conversation heard at the moment, birds he sees out the window, the light, the temperature–the way thoughts and physical phenomena interact. In short he is drawing active diagrams of synaesthesia in pen and ink.

Cha uses cloth and incorporates jagged embroidery as a form of drawing. Her threads make marks and those marks lead to revelations that reveal pain and healing. Her embroidery is not facile or pretty, in fact, as far as textile art goes, her work is transgressive. She does not let us forget that these ideas are on cloth but we don’t lose sight of the hand, loose and improvisatory in its drawings in thread.

Cha is from Seoul, Korea, and received her MBA from Ewha Womens University. Kosek, from the Czech Republic, is the quintessential art brut maker. Both sense profound physical and non-physical phenomena and speak a limbic language of survival and transcendence through their works.

Cavin-Morris Gallery
210 Eleventh Avenue, Suite 201 (Between West 24th and 25th Streets)
New York, NY 10001
Phone:  (212)2263768
Web: www.cavinmorris.com