Posts Tagged ‘mel-prest’
Echo Spectrum at Trestle Gallery
What a joy to be included in the exhibition, Echo Spectrum at Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, a group show, co-curated by artists Mel Prest and Kirk Stoller, focusing on nine artists who share a common visual dialect through various media, each exploring fragile geometric structures that simultaneously seem to build up and fall apart.
That this gathering of contemporary artworks, could be organized into such a cohesive whole exemplifies the possibility of authentically connecting in a digital age. Each of the nine featured artists are currently working in locations as disparate as Ghent, Belgium; Nottingham and London, England; Brooklyn, Chicago, and Madison, WI in the US. The Internet helps artists and curators access creative dialogue by enabling geographically decentralized artistic movements. In turn, shared aesthetic pursuits surface, despite physical distance.
This exhibition presents proof of parallel work and artworks that emphasize the relevance of abstraction, and its inherent accessibility. By utilizing the objective qualities of colour, form, movement, pattern and repetition, the artwork featured in Echo Spectrum transcends age, culture, gender, place, and other isolating factors. Therefore, the viewer is encouraged to be present as the artwork delivers an intimate view into the ideas, intention, and labour of these artists, who wish to share of themselves and their work with others, offering us a way, through their work, to connect across borders and time.
Opening Reception: Friday February 24th, 7-9pm
On view through March 28th, 2017
Curated by Mel Prest and Kirk Stoller
Participating Artists:
Sarah Bednarek
Nelleke Beltjens
Vivien Collens
Hanz Hancock
Lauri Hopkins
Anna Kunz
Patrick Morrissey
Andy Parkinson
At the Point of Gesture at the Lion and Lamb Gallery
At the Point of Gesture opened at the Lion and Lamb Gallery on 23 February 2013 and runs until 23 March: curated by David Ryan it’s a show of abstract paintings and a video, by five artists Clem Crosby, Gabriel Hartley, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, David Ryan and Alaena Turner , each in their different ways exploring the potential of gesture, materiality and improvisation.
Maybe the exhibition title suggests that the works are only just at the point of gesture, like the Andrea Madjesi-Jones painting, where gesture seems to be included in a wider pictorial strategy, or perhaps that they have arrived at the point of gesture having set out from some other place, Clem Crosby’s work, for example, coming out of the monochrome tradition to a reconsideration of the role of drawing. Then again, in Aleana Turner’s Secret Action Painting 3 gesture is as much implied as it is physically present.
A point could almost be the opposite of a gesture, I’m thinking of pointillism where all those dots of colour negate the action of the sweeping brush stroke, yet once the dots are aggregated gestures of a sort do start to emerge. In physiological communication, to point is to gesture, and now I have in mind Grunwald’s amazing Isenhheim altarpiece where John the Baptist points at the crucified Jesus. Here the gesture refers to another, and I wonder if that might also be the case with gesture in abstract (non referential) painting, the minimum reference being to the act of painting itself, surely one of the points of the current Painting After Performance show at Tate modern.
Gabriel Hartley’s spray paint over impasto brushwork seems somehow to simultaneously both dissolve and emphasise the gestural mark-making, such contradictions being possible in a painting, even if nowhere else.

Gabriel Hartley, Frack, 2013, spray paint and oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm, Image by courtesy of Lion and Lamb Gallery
Approaching action painting, the individual marks almost lose themselves in the one gesture that is the finished piece. Kelp is almost white and Frack is almost black, and it’s difficult not to read them as monochromes, even though that tradition usually implies the repudiation of the gestural.
David Ryan’s Fame in California/1964, a small canvas in orange and pink has a central ‘sculptural’ figure flanked by indistinct forms or brushmarks and overlayed (or wrapped around) with a roughly painted green motif. In the top left hand corner a flat white rectangle asserts the painting’s edge, against which the rest of the action seems to recede in a pictorial, non-perspectival space. Because it is optical, the space is ambiguous, it shifts slightly and the pink and orange brush strokes or blobs and a line that traces the edge of the figure, now appear to occupy a place somewhere in between the white rectangle up front and the main form further back.

David Ryan, Fame in California/1964, 2012, Oil on Canvas, 30 x 36cm. Image by courtesy Lion and Lamb Gallery
I recall that I enjoyed seeing another David Ryan painting here in the summer of 2012, a lovely little thing in black white and greys, entitled Index. It had a white rectangle in the left hand corner, similar to the one on show today. In both works this ‘hard edge’ rectangle seems incongruous, as if, there, inserted into the picture, is another very different one, a monochrome again, a painting within a painting that has me consider what other kinds of picture this one could also have become.
In Clem Crosby’s Little Wing, magenta and black continuous swirling lines dance on a grey ground that looks like the result of all but erased previous versions of the loose network that forms the painted ‘image’. It’s difficult not to see it as existing in a kind of landscape, the loops at the bottom of the canvas suggesting a floor upon which the lines are ‘standing’, like a sculpture of string or tape.

Clem Crosby, Little Wing, 2012-2013, Oil on Formica mounted on Aluminium, 76.2 x 61cm. Image by courtesy of Lion and Lamb Gallery
I attempt to work out where each swirl begins and ends. In an image there is no such thing as a start and a finish yet the brush had to touch the support somewhere first and lay off somewhere too, but those entry and exit points become difficult to identify. In tracing the action with my eye and brain I also have something of the sensation of following with my hand and arm, for all I know they are actually moving, like when feeding an infant I find that I open my own mouth. So I notice that I am at the point of gesture myself, as if answering an invitation to explore the theme of the exhibition, as a viewer and also as a practitioner of abstract painting. The exhibition poses questions, for me, about the role of painterliness, offering a kind of counterpoint to my own preoccupation with systems. Here, painting is physical and the design is improvised, whereas my own practice is more cerebral and pre-planned. It’s not that a systems approach precludes chance and gesture, Kenneth Martin comes to mind as does Mel Prest whose gestural line drawings produced in a totally non-random fashion have the appearance of something random or ‘felt’, and David Ryan’s work already addresses the relationship between construction and improvisation. However, this show opens up for me some interesting questions and suggestions for future practice are starting to form.
One of the stated goals of the Lion and Lamb Gallery is to provide an opportunity for painters to curate visual essays that examine current practices in painting, and for me this show delightfully succeeds in this intention.
Character, Letter, and the Misbehave – Mel Prest (via )
I keep coming across blogs and photos of the paintings of Mel Prest. I am impressed by her work
via
This blog was the one that sparked my interest.
There’s also this You Tube video that is a good introduction, referring to a show in 2008
and I found this blog interesting, about the paintings and about Mel Prest as teacher, from a student’s point of view.
Best of all is Mel Prest’s website. I highly recommend the animation page; check it out!
Here’s hoping for a show of her work in the UK sometime soon.