© Stacy L. Smith
Be sure to come out to our studio on April 19th 2014, from 2-6PM to browse and buy the latest works from these three very talented artists! Tricyclical @ The Hardy & Nance Studios, 902 Hardy, Studio #17, Houston TX 77020
The Art of Em Connor.
Connor has been producing some very interesting work over the past couple of years. Since her time at the University of Houston, she has dropped technical representation for conceptualism and process. Not unlike her predecessors in Abstract Expressionism, such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Wassily Kandinsky, where one’s art process was simply the extension of the arm, Connor is exploring similar processes using resin, ink and acrylic paints in her recent work. She attributes playing with chemicals such as denatured alcohol as a means of erasing the images she creates, and painstakingly inspired a car wreck that she was in where she suffered memory loss some ten years ago. The images she chooses are those memories she has none of, like her 18th birthday, a specific event that she only has traces of in the form of photographs. Recently she has begun creating disjointed figures that are combined with her lengthy chemical processes. “Do you Realize?” a rather large piece (pictured left) is intentionally warped, emphasizing the female figure that acts as the ground for the painting, the action on the surface is a means of binding the figure and obstructing it from the viewer. Likewise her newer works, “A mile in her shoes,” and “Saoirse” both run along the same theme, are much smaller at only 8x10” but are caked in resin, like semi-transparent icing giving the candy colored works a more disjointed view of a toes and fingers. Still the images are blown up on an almost telescopic scale within the small space, are overlarge just as the figure in “Do you realize?” Connor who is known for adding GPS locations to her work skipped that in these images, and rather than focusing on memories lost, has turn the focus of her work internally, exploring the psychology of the figure itself.
The Art of Allison Currie:
Post-minimalism, Dandelions and Feathers.
According to the Guggenheim Museum, “Coined by the art historian and critic Robert Pincus-Witten, Post-Minimalism refers to a general reaction by artists in America beginning in the late 1960s against Minimalism and its insistence on closed, geometric forms. These dissenting artists eschewed the impersonal object for more open forms.” This holds true for the latest works produced by Allison Currie. She has been steadily playing with the contrast between organic forms in a geometric grid. Like the works of Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse, Currie is exploring her own reaction to creating painstakingly hand-made tiny forms within a superimposed grid. Her work “2688 Dandelion Seeds” ( a detail of the work is pictured left) encompasses weeks of drawing a dandelion seed in various phases and movement all with ink. The permanence of ink allows no errors in judgment as to the composition and direction of each seed drawn. The work is seamless with a steady staccato beat that one would meditate on within a sheet of music as though drumming out the rhythm of life through the seed. She is currently continuing this series with feathers, in the same scale, but on a much larger sheet of paper.
Post-minimalism, Dandelions and Feathers.
According to the Guggenheim Museum, “Coined by the art historian and critic Robert Pincus-Witten, Post-Minimalism refers to a general reaction by artists in America beginning in the late 1960s against Minimalism and its insistence on closed, geometric forms. These dissenting artists eschewed the impersonal object for more open forms.” This holds true for the latest works produced by Allison Currie. She has been steadily playing with the contrast between organic forms in a geometric grid. Like the works of Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse, Currie is exploring her own reaction to creating painstakingly hand-made tiny forms within a superimposed grid. Her work “2688 Dandelion Seeds” ( a detail of the work is pictured left) encompasses weeks of drawing a dandelion seed in various phases and movement all with ink. The permanence of ink allows no errors in judgment as to the composition and direction of each seed drawn. The work is seamless with a steady staccato beat that one would meditate on within a sheet of music as though drumming out the rhythm of life through the seed. She is currently continuing this series with feathers, in the same scale, but on a much larger sheet of paper.
In My Room, Art Dreams and the Figure:
New Art by Stäcy Smith.
Smith has often termed her work to be “contemporary surrealism,” her paintings often depict people floating in a living room or bedroom and sometimes they are accompanied with animals. She tries to break down the barriers of an easily read narrative by using realism or representation juxtaposed with oddities in her works. Fully engulfed in the three dimensional illusion of space on a two dimensional plane her work is extremely colorful, plays with lighting and balance and above all tells a story. But to as to what that story is, she leaves to the viewer, by only showing the viewer one snippet from her imagination, often, from her very own dreams. She is currently working on a new series in which the figure takes precedent over the space it inhabits and instead of posting progress as she normally would on Facebook is trying a different tactic in which she will unveil the completed new work in her studio at Hardy & Nance Studios, # 17 on April 19th from 2-6PM.
(Pictured above is "Red Room" 48x65.5 Acrylic on Canvas, Private Collection of Mia Brice)
New Art by Stäcy Smith.
Smith has often termed her work to be “contemporary surrealism,” her paintings often depict people floating in a living room or bedroom and sometimes they are accompanied with animals. She tries to break down the barriers of an easily read narrative by using realism or representation juxtaposed with oddities in her works. Fully engulfed in the three dimensional illusion of space on a two dimensional plane her work is extremely colorful, plays with lighting and balance and above all tells a story. But to as to what that story is, she leaves to the viewer, by only showing the viewer one snippet from her imagination, often, from her very own dreams. She is currently working on a new series in which the figure takes precedent over the space it inhabits and instead of posting progress as she normally would on Facebook is trying a different tactic in which she will unveil the completed new work in her studio at Hardy & Nance Studios, # 17 on April 19th from 2-6PM.
(Pictured above is "Red Room" 48x65.5 Acrylic on Canvas, Private Collection of Mia Brice)