Landscape City

Center for the Arts Eagle Rock presents:

Landscape City

curated by Jonah Olson

OPENING Saturday, November 8, 7-11 pm

EXHIBITION November 8 – December 11, 2014

GALLERY Monday – Friday, 11am – 5pm

Landscape City is a place where the artist, audience, and landscape meld. The art on view blurs the line between environmental creation and observation. In this space, one’s interaction with the landscape is subtle and subjective but decidedly There.

ARTISTS

Greg Dalton

Pearl C. Hsiung

Alvaro Ilizarbe

Jake Longstreth

Jonah Olson

Peter Scherrer

Allison Schulnik

Jennifer Juniper Stratford

Jesse Wiedel

Ulrich Wulff

Opening night music

Points of Friction (Joseph Hammer)

Ted Byrnes and Kristian Aspelin

LA Fog

Aaron Olson and ensemble performing the score to Allison Schulnik’s EAGER

Opening night live visual projections

JJ Stratford and Stephi Duckula

Mad As Hell

Animal Charm

Emily Kuntz

image credit: Alvaro Ilizarbe 

About the Artists:

Greg Dalton

Dalton works with various media including painting to reveal moments when natural form seems to take on a presence of life, and expresses a personality of its own. In the work forms suggest other forms which correspond to a symbolic and surreal sensibility in which a dialectic is developed between landscape, figures, stones, plants, machines, and history. The compositions often take on characteristics that are threatening, banal, or erotic.

 

Pearl Hsiung

Drawn from over forty hours of film, Yellowstoner is a site specific work that takes place at Yellowstone National Park. The film features bubbling pools of mud, exploding geysers, and rainbow tinted pools. These personal portrayals of natural marvels are rarely encountered in person however in this film offers the viewer an opportunity to interact with both the creator and the environment in which is was made.

 

Alvaro Ilizarbe

Ilizarbe’s work is influenced by pre-columbian art, textiles, tileable patterns, nature and color.  Color adds layers of emotions conducive to prescribed feelings. Ilizarbe’s work transforms spaces into different dimensions by distorting perception and depth of field.  Recently his work has taken on an attention to geography and geology, reflecting landscapes of a time long before civilization emerged.

 

Jake Longstreth

Longstreth’s straightforward compositions and attention to space and light depict the improvised nature of landscape. The paintings which are made without source materials in the studio show a correlation between the psychological and physical experiece of landscape.  The initial familiarity of these landscapes give way to an idiosyncratic mode of mark making, allowing the viewer to oscillate between abstract and realist tendencies.

 

Jonah Olson

Using printmaking, rubbing, drawing, collage, and other mark making techniques Olson investigates the process of geological formations, these compositions also reflect relationships between the changing and static, as well as internal and external perceptions.  The personal environments often focus on the San Gabriel Mountains, which has recently been declared a national monument by the Obama administration, and is one of the fastest growing and eroding mountain ranges in the world.

 

Peter Scherrer

Bellingham Washington based Peter Scherrer, works in oils and watercolors to portray disjointed lands of uncanny features in phenomenological environments. Familiar elements found in natural spaces associated with the Pacific Northwest are often shown through both representational and abstract strategies that echo the compositions of work by the Group of Seven.

 

Allison Schulnik

Drawing from sources both autobiographical and inspirational, Eager is a poignant journey set between a timeless void and supernatural abundance; it is a celebration of the moving painting. An experiment in animation as dance, its subjects are choreographed in abstract, emotive gestures. The line is blurred between the material, natural, and physical elements of painting; as well as the physicality and movement of landscape and ballet.

 

J.J. Stratford

Stratford is a multidimensional artist based in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited and screened online and internationally in museum and national public access channel contexts.  She finds new uses for broadcast equipment cast off from the entertainment industry in search of a new future for the television signal. It is through this technological reuse that this film finds its reciprocal relationship to Yellowstoner.

 

Jesse Weidel

Eureka based Jesse Weidel uses painting to depict scenarios that contain juxtapositions of normal commonplace banality with the decay of surrounding characters and situations. The work shows a fascination with the cultural and economic constraints that contain these characters, as well as the degeneracy and failure that they experience.

 

Ulrich Wulff

Berlin based Ulrich Wulff uses form and space to create vivid and viewer accessible environments. The forms of the seen in the canvases indicate a self-awareness while simultaneously representing a fear of the brush mark. The precision and improvisation involved in the painting process are reflected in the both the painting itself as well as through the desert environment in which they were made. The mark making process conveys the confidence of Italian renaissance sketching as well as the humbleness of Japanese calligraphy.