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
5790 Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday - Saturday 11-6, and by appointment daily
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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