Summer Contemporaries | July 14 – August 20, 2022

Summer Contemporaries | July 14 – August 20, 2022

Summer Contemporaries brings together a selection of new work that has never been seen in the gallery. Works by gallery artists María Fernanda Cardoso, Thomas Glassford, Melanie Smith, and new gallery artist Jorinde Voigt come together in a summer exhibition that is refreshing and of-the-moment. Join us for an opening reception on Thursday, July 14 from 6-8pm. The exhibition will be on view through August 20, 2022.

 

María Fernanda Cardoso [b. 1963, Colombia] captures the elaborate mating rituals of Maratus spiders through both a video piece and a series of microscopic, deep-focus photographs. Each work features a spider’s abdomen in isolation against an austere backdrop, elevating the colors and patterns accompanying an instinctual ritual into the realm of fine art. As Cardoso explains, “Their use of colour, gesture, sound and movement makes them (in my opinion) amongst the most sophisticated visual and performing artists in the world. They are also the smallest performers I know of—on average about 4-6mm in size, smaller than a grain of rice.”

 

Thomas Glassford [b. 1963, USA/Lives in Mexico City] uses everyday materials – ranging from gourds to broomsticks, anodized aluminum to melamine plates – to create architectural or installation-scale works. He transforms these materials into rhythmic and often abstract creations, reminiscent of Minimalist sculpture and Op Art paintings of the 1960s.

 

According to Melanie Smith [b. 1965, England/Lives in Mexico City and London], “Fifteen Minutes of Sublime Meditation was made as a response to being in lockdown in the winter of 2020 – 21. It is made of stock images that flow like forms of compulsive saturation and repetition, generating a flattening of  information that ends up losing any relationship to scale or hierarchy…The paintings work in tension with the video and were also made during lockdown. Whereas the video is about our contemporary sense of the sublime and how we assimilate so many terrifying scales at one given moment (global warming, data, networks different changing macro micro relationships etc) the paintings go back into the history of the sublime, into the Romantic sense of the depiction of landscape…”

 

Jorinde Voigt [b. 1977, Germany] observes and explores the inner processes of perception in relation to various aspects and subjects such as affects and emotions, imagination, memory, sensory experience, natural and cultural phenomena, scientific data as well as interpersonal actions and relationships. In her Studies on Reality (2021), Voigt combines drawing and collage, mounting a three-dimensional collage onto mirror glass. While smaller in scale than most of her work, this series creates the illusion of infinite space and incorporates the element of time, playing with the viewer’s perception and the changing effects of light.

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