Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Julie Heffernan "Sky's Falling" and Jean-Pierre Roy "Terraformer" at Mark Moore Gallery, Culver City, California




Mark Moore Gallery is proud to present Sky’s Falling, an exhibition of paintings by New York artist, Julie Heffernan. Marking the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery, Sky’s Falling showcases the latest incarnations of an ongoing oeuvre of distinctive self-portraits in which quite interior worlds of personal symbolism are made exterior allegories. Despite their autobiographical quality, Heffernan's images proffer a larger discourse concerning our anthropocentric worldview – a sociopolitical attitude that has resulted in an ecological clash with nature. 

As with her previous self-portraits, Heffernan’s recent paintings function as metaphors of a surrogate-self, engendering both the intimate world of the psyche, as well as the societal undercurrents of the present moment. Heffernan’s tableaux are rife with idiosyncratic references that draw the eye deep into a cryptic, mythical puzzle of overabundance waiting to be solved. Personal as they may appear, each composition confounds the singular interpretation, inviting the viewer to hypothesize connotations and frameworks uniquely their own. The artist welcomes us to meander about her private world, beckoning us to consider the state of contemporary consciousness - a mindset defined by its break with past certainties as we contemplate how drastically different our world looks from our 21st century vantage point. Unlike the old masters, whose visual vocabulary the artist references stylistically, Heffernan approaches the genres of still life, portraiture, and landscape much in the same way as a surrealist might. Reminiscent of the works of Dorothea Tanning, Heffernan is less as an empiricist or positivist merely recording reality, but more of a surveyor of the subconscious—the definitive architecture of our reality. Simultaneously, this concentration on personal mythos is filled with an impassioned atmosphere, in which an irrepressible force, namely nature, threatens to reclaim its own narrative. The result is an ominous parable, as if from a Grimm's fairy tale, warning us of our follies, and foretelling an apex at which biology and humanity will collide.

Heffernan (b. 1956, Illinois) received her MFA from Yale School of Art (CT), and has been exhibiting widely for the past two decades. Selected exhibitions include those at The Kwangju Biennial (Korea), Weatherspoon Art Gallery (NC), The Me Museum (Berlin), Knoxville Museum Of Art (TN), Columbia Museum Of Art (SC), Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), The New Museum (NY), The Norton Museum (FL), The American Academy Of Arts And Letters (NY), Kohler Arts Center (WI), The Palmer Museum Of Art (PA), National Academy Of Art (NY), McNay Art Museum (TX), Herter Art Gallery (MA), Mint Museum (NC), Virginia Museum of Fine Art (VA), and Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OK) among numerous others. Her work has also been acquired by many of the institutions listed above.

Mark Moore Gallery
5790 Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
Tel 310 453 3031
Fax 310 453 3831
info@markmooregallery.com
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday - Saturday 11-6, and by appointment daily























"Terraformer," is the inaugural exhibition of paintings by Brooklyn-based artist, Jean-Pierre Roy. Despite his photorealistic prowess, Roy's terrains are sourced from pure imagination – cinematic dystopias through a Dutch Golden Age lens. His Neo-Luminist panoramas engender an ominous tone, a sense of uniquely human ruination evident through melting icecaps, crumbling towers, and purging smokestacks. In this new body of work, Roy considers the beauty in catastrophe, as well as the repercussions of our fallible heedlessness.


Roy's obsessive meticulousness is analogous to the objective of modernized globalization – no canvas remains bare as no frontier remains untouched. His compositional horror vacui is increasingly less science fiction than it is foreshadow, as infinite industrial horizons appear as foreign as sketches of the New World were once perceived. Though his tableaus appear largely unpopulated, Roy uses dilapidated structures and techno-iconography to express a Physicalist paradigm of the world. Alongside the remnants of an imperialist gluttony too large to sustain, Roy introduces a solitary figure of epic proportions – an allegorical projection of the artist himself as a world-building "giant." Drawing upon an art historical lineage, Roy recontextualizes Goya's colossus as a cipher for the insatiable search for ultimate knowledge. His figures underline the sublime and terrifying aftermath of a sociopolitical cupidity. Although he critiques the myth of an all-saving hero, Roy alludes to hope through the drama of a distant rising sun or luminous structures – as though salvation waits at the dawn of a collective enlightenment.

Jean-Pierre Roy (born 1974, Santa Monica, CA) received his MFA from the New York Academy of Art (NY), and has since had solo exhibitions in New York, Seattle, and Chicago. His work has been exhibited at the Hyde Park Arts Center (IL), Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (VA), the Neuberger Museum (NY), and the Torrance Art Museum (CA), among others. Roy's work has been acquired by several collections, including the Zabludowicz Collection, Pigozzi Collection, and Fischl Collection. This exhibition marks the gallery's first solo exhibition for Roy. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.











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Happy Halloween!!

 My annual Halloween art post is here! Enjoy this Halloween art.