When commenting on the artist's most influentialperiod of 1924 to 1932, Marcel Duchamp stated thatFrancis Picabia had added a fourth dimension topainting. Concurrent with investigations by Duchampand Man Ray, Picabia investigated layers of literal andfigurative meaning by juxtaposing Old Master subjects and techniques with references to bibliocal, optic, photographic, opium-inspired, Freudian and occult sources.

Francis Picabia : Accommodations of Desire: Transparencies 1924-1932

Arts & Photography

WILSON, SARAH

Individual Artists

Kent Gallery

Seen from a certain perspective, or at a certain magnification, all that is solid melts into air -- or clouds of atoms, or drifts of luminous vapor. Bodies, whether of land, water, or flesh, are unstable aggregates; they are accidents, caught only by coincidence in forms we recognize. For several years, Heidi Fasnacht has been tracking the energy released when that familiar cohesion is ruptured, and the always-present world of particles in collision is made manifest. Thus her images, in two dimensions and three, of detonations, implosions, geysers, volcanoes, fireworks, ticker tape parades, sneezes … The drawings are meticulous but lively, heavily worked but crisp and fresh. They are based on photographs and executed in pencil, the strokes short and deliberate, though in some passages, the surface is smudged or scuffed. Patterns associated with various techniques in mechanical reproduction, including parallel hatchmarkers and raster dots, come into play. Sometimes in the black and white drawings – those of explosions at sea, for instance – the paper is treated as if it were an etching plate, or a stencil: it is stippled, scratched, pitted, even perforated. The colored pencil drawings of volcanoes, on the other hand, can be as silky as a finely worked tapestry, and as luxuriant.

Heide Fasnacht

Princenthal, Nancy

Fasnacht, Heide

Llyn Foulkes tableaus may be read as an emotional response to the political and economic climate of our time. Using found objects laminated into the painting surface, Foulkes expresses a sense of an aborted utopia. His unique manipulations of materials and perspective convey a moral imperative to come to terms with extraordinary states of distress and alienation. Foulkes began exhibiting with the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles in 1959. Through the late sixties into the seventies, Foulkes would create trademark landscape paintings that utilized the iconography of postcards, vintage landscape photography, and Route 66 inspired hazard signs transformed into sly symbols of the broken promise of freedom once embedded in the American fantasy of the open road. Since the early 1980s, Foulkes has turned to working on a series of tableaux beginning with O Pablo(1983). His work POP, (1986-1990), in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, utilizes fragments of real clothing, real upholstery all conjoined with the painted surface. Paul Shimmel included POP, along with a new group of paintings, in his Helter Skelter exhibition of 1992. His most recent large scale projects are The Lost Frontier (1997-2004) and Deliverance (2004-2007).

Llyn Foulkes

Dennis Adam's Double Feature is a series of composite stills collaged from individual frames grabbed from Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1959) and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1965). In Adam's constructed images Jean Seberg walks out of Breathless and into the demonstrations, checkpoints and skirmishes of the Algerian Revolution. Seberg, a flirtatious young American hawking newspapers in Paris, is recast as an allegorical figure wandering the war-torn streets of Algiers, where she traces the fault line between the role of messenger bearing the news and frontline witness to its making.

Dennis Adams: Double Feature

Dennis Adams

John Brill earned a degree in physiological psychology, steeping himself in the scientific method – the practice of discriminating fact from hypothesis – before committing himself in 1981 to art-making. Beginning with staged portraits and self-portrait, his imagery became increasingly nebulous, reflecting his interest "in how resonance could remain unaffected by the systematic removal of content." he scavenged for pictures, made some from life and others from the television screen, then worked to distance the images from their origins through multiple printings, fragmentation, tonal shifts and value reversals. In the end, the pictures derive more from mind than from matter. They’re projections of his will, contrived out of pure desire.

The Photography of John Brill

Dorothea Tanning, who was born in 1910 in Galesburg, a town on the Illinois prairie, is one of America’s major surrealist artists. She first came to fame in the 1940s when she showed in the gallery of Julien Levy, New York’s preeminent dealer of surrealism. However, in the 1950s she felt a growing need to move beyond the prevailing idiom of surrealist representation. She describes what happened: “Around 1955 my canvases literally splintered . . . I broke the mirror, you might say.” The resulting paintings are vibrant with faceted colors and shifting spaces. The Insomnias — the group takes its name from a painting of the same title that Tanning made in 1957 — are forays into the realm of conjured energies; they represent a vigorous expansion of form and content at a crucial historical moment that continues to reverberate today. Charles Stuckey describes these “seemingly multidimensional mindspaces” as “among the most ambitious and sophisticated paintings to address the dilemmas of imagination and culture in a new atomic, space-race age.”

Dorothea Tanning: Insomnias 1954-1965

Charles Stuckey and Richard Howard

Beverly McIver paints her life. Her “preparatory sketches” are either family photos she has snapped or costumed self-portraits that she sets up. McIver transforms these photographic images into works of painterly bravura and expressionist force. As Irving Sandler writes in his essay, “McIver’s portraiture bridges specific ‘realism’ and emotional ‘expressionism.’ Her brush . . . penetrates the photograph’s surface, opening the image to new depth and dimension.”  In McIver’s work, autobiographical portraiture becomes a means to explore “otherness” and its many manifestations, from family roles to racial identities.   McIver has had numerous solo shows in galleries and museums across the country.  Her work was included in the seminal group exhibitions HairStories and Looking Forward, Looking Black. She is the recipient of many honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award.

Beverly McIver: Invisible Me

Irving Sandler

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