Alicia Piller

While working in the fashion industry; living a decade in NYC and three and a half years in Santa Fe, NM, Piller cultivated her distinctive sculptural voice. Continuing to expand her artistic practice, Alicia completed her MFA focused on sculpture and installation from CalArts in May of 2019.

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Alexander Ney

Got to drop in on Beyond the Surface: Collage, Mixed Media and Textile Works from the Collection at the always excellent (and fortunately local) Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University recently and just love the Alexander Ney below.

Turns out it’s an early work and not wish he’s most known for.

#alexanderney

Katinka Mann

Katinka Mann (1925–2022) was deeply modern in her exploration of form, color, and light. This modernity was linked to her optimism and generosity of spirit. She approved of the flatness of minimalist painting and was a student of Taoism, finding balance in opposites and calmness in paradox. To highlight this practice, EFA studio program recently presented Perception of Space.

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Toward

I’ve thought about the observation below several times since first seeing it on the Instagrams, as I have a good bit of loathing for academics who get hung-up on needing to be recognized as post-modern. Interestingly, I first saw the post right after giving the final lecture for my color class recently. In it, I covered artists who make color their primary subject. I started by telling them the story of Western Art that we were all taught (the story, and that it is one- which Mr Saltz points to in his comment below his repost of a Tweet). Art moves “forward.” As I’ve noted, I don’t hold to the notion that Art has anywhere to go. AND, I am sensitive to the reality that I feel, about the moment that is 2023, probably very similar to many creatives and intellectuals we would label Modernist, that I am living in a moment that necessitates change and that our past socio-economic systems and norms will not serve in the world as it is developing. One can move toward a goal without having to call the direction of movement “forward” or note it as “linear,” or attribute casualty or necessity for the movement. BTW, Jerry’s last book Art is Life is nice collection of essays from several decades.

I mentioned in my last post that I had accomplished- moved “toward”- my goal of curating an exhibit. ExtraSpectral is now open to the public, at the Truist Gallery which is on the 1st floor of the Durham Art Council building (but operated by Durham Art Guild) at 120 Morris St in downtown Durham- until June 6. Public hours are Monday – Saturday, 9:00AM-9:00PM, and Sundays, 1:00PM-6:00PM. BTW, a couple of the artists gave a talk during a soft opening which you can view on YouTube. I learned quite a bit from the process, as hoped.

I am also moving toward a large, finished painting that has been in progress for a minute, if one considers it’s effectively the 3rd iteration of an idea.

Tamara Mendels

Tamara Mendels received a MFA (Painting) from Sydney College of the Arts in 2011.

She positons her practice as “advocating for the necessity of the continued discovery of painting in abstraction. The importance of connecting with abstraction in a post modernist world in the age of media and technology is that abstraction seeks to destabilise social and cultural barriers using autonomous visual language that translates human emotion to unite people in a shared grounding experience. My desire to produce harmonious and precise works, heightened by the interplay between positive and negative spaces, utilises my cumulative painting technique of continuous applications of line and colour crystallized into the formation of the primary mark
to induce an ecstatic trance-like state of observation.”

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