DRAWING

Opening Reception : November 14, 2009 7 - 10 pm.

Show Runs: November 14 - 25, 2009

Marlov Barrios

(Guatemala, 1980)

Artista visual, co-fundador del grupo La Torana y del Taller Experimental de Gráfica de Guatemala. Estudió arquitectura en la Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala y grabado en la Escuela de pintura, escultura y grabado "La Esmeralda", México D.F.

Entre sus exposiciones colectivas recientes, están: 1er. Aniversario, Taller Experimental de Gráfica de Guatemala, Centro Cultural Metropolitano Guatemala 2009, Landings 8, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei 2008, Segundo Salón Nacional del Grabado, Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno Guatemala 2008, Trans, Centro Cultural de España, Guatemala 2008, Taller Experimental de Gráfica, Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Guatemala 2008, La Joven Estampa, selección del jurado, Casa de Las Americas, La Habana Cuba 2007, V Bienal de Artes Visuales del Istmo Centroamericano, Museo de Arte de El Salvador 2006, etc.

Con La Torana: "Aquí, Radio Nuevo Mundo" La Torana, Galería Medellin 174, México D.F 2008, Mirando al Sur, Centro para la Cooperación Española en Antigua Guatemala 2008, XVI Bienal de Arte Paiz Guatemala 2008, VI Bienal de Artes Visuales del Istmo Centroamericano y "Competencia Desleal" en el Centro Cultural de España,Tegucigalpa Honduras 2008, Portátil, La Torana, Galería Códice Managua Nicaragua 2008, La Torana, Galería El Attico, Guatemala 2006 y La Torana, Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno Carlos Merida y Paseo de los Museos, Centro Cultural Casa Santo Domingo Antigua Guatemala 2005, entre otras.

Entre los reconocimientos que ha recibido figuran: Glifo de Oro (La Torana), XVI Bienal de Arte Paiz Guatemala 2008, Primer Premio en el Segundo Salón Nacional del Grabado 2008, Glifo de Plata, Artistas Invitados en la XV Bienal de Arte Paiz, Guatemala 2006, Mención al grabador menor de 30 años en el Primer Salón Nacional del Grabado Guatemala 2005, Premio Único de Pintura, Arte Subasta Club Rotario Guatemala Sur 2005.

Santiago Castillo

Santiago Castillo was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and moved to Florida in his early teens. Santiago’s passion for art came at an early age, when he would spend countless hours drawing his favorite superheroes and cartoon characters while fantasizing about becoming an artist. Having been fortunate enough to travel to many different countries and experiencing their diverse cultures has helped shape his body of work, in which he attempts to retain his impressions of each culture by recreating the memories of a place, which differ from the place itself, with ink on polyurethane-bonded paper. In 2009, Santiago graduated with a double major in Fine Arts and Art History from Florida International University in Miami, Florida, Where he still lives and works.

SOUVENIRS

Each drawing depicts a place to which I have been. These slanted, edited memories are reconstructed on the abstracted two-dimensional surface with brush and line. The travel log now relives in a coded, patterned and redirected attempt to describe the feeling of being here and there– facts and fabrications collide.

The reality of the places or events I’ve experienced is long gone. All that is left is what my memory retained– not as it has been portrayed in atlases or fancy postcards found at souvenir shops– as my own brain chooses to remember it. Inks and paint– suspended in polyurethane-covered layers of paper– act as a means to resurrect these lost realities.

Lisette Morel is a Dominican-American artist born 1974 in Manhattan, NY. Currently, she works and lives in New Jersey.

This October 2009 she will be participating in City without walls art gallery art auction.

She completed the Aljira Emerge 10 program in 2008 and recently exhibited her work in the Emerge 10 show 2009. She participated in “Repeating Islands” exhibition at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in 2008.

Her work has also been exhibited at El Museo del Barrio’s Fifth Biennial: The (S) Files 2007.

Morel is a recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant. Her work has been reviewed by The New York Times and The Star Ledger. She has also exhibited at the Jersey City Museum in the “Jersey(new) Transcultural” in 2004 and the African American Museum in Philadelphia, PA.

She completed her MFA at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, PA. in 2000 and her BA at Rutgers, Newark, NJ in 1998.

My small drawings are personal; a mapping, an accumulated language. My intuitive reactions to the sense of touch are recorded on paper- from the weight of the charcoal and the anticipated velvety mark it produces to how the marks amass and react with one another.

The act of repetition coupled with the energy of the interaction and accumulation amongst my familiar yet fresh marks and the anticipation as to what will be revealed is what drives my process.

My practice derives from formalities yet breaks off once my brush, pencil, charcoal or my finger touches the surface. The limitations, contradictions and repetitiveness are evident in my limited palette choice, the time and space allotted for a piece, and the mark making be it on paper, canvas, or the wall. The layers allow for moments to be revealed and or concealed. The repetition is the fountain head of invention for me, the marks beckon each other and as I place one mark next to, on top of, or underneath the other, it all comes to life before me.

Lisette Morel

Vickie Pierre

Vickie Pierre is a Haitian - American artist born in Brooklyn, New York. Pierre has participated in many solo and group exhibitions in and out of Florida including The Gulf Coast Museum, Largo, FL; Kerry Inman Gallery, Houston, TX, Scott White Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA and White Box in New York City. In 2003, Pierre participated in The Caribbean Biennial V at the Museum of Modern Art in the Dominican Republic where her work represented Haiti. Also in 2003 Pierre was selected by the Four Seasons in Miami as one of three Miami artists commissioned to create over 300 works on paper and canvas for the hotels' guest suites and private collection. In 2004, Pierre participated in a group exhibition of seventeen women artists from Florida, titled Transitory Patterns. The inaugural exhibition was displayed at The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. and subsequently traveled to numerous museums throughout the state of Florida thru 2006.

Vickie Pierre's paintings and works on paper have been exhibited at Art Basel, Miami Beach from 2002 - 2005. Additional fairs include the National Black Fine Art Show, Pulse, Scope and Aqua fairs.

Selected Collections include The Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, FL; Progressive Art Collection, Cleveland, Ohio; Millennium Partners Collection of Contemporary Art, The Four Seasons, Miami, FL and ALFA - Wasserman Collection, Bologna, Italy.

Pierre is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the Deering Estate at Cutler, Miami, FL.

Within my paintings and drawings, rubber stamp imprints of fictional female icons, are converted into a world where the line between abstraction and representation is blurred. The works are primarily comprised of the dresses of the "three graces" of the fairy tale animation world: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. The repetitive applications and manipulation of the stamped images into clusters and groupings, along with occasional handwritten text, have become the basis of a connective network that alludes, to identity, order, sensuality and feminine psychology. The repeated application of these icons, also mirror their mass produced presence in popular culture. I am drawn to these characters; their underlying themes and their symbolic significance. In appropriating these images and in turn reconfiguring them, I am attempting to create a new meaning (or story). They are now faceless totems, deities, icons of a different caliber. These deconstructed and distorted shapes now become otherworldly characters with sensual and precious personalities. They are self-contained and self-generating, recalling the abstractions and distortions of flora as well as the human body (internally and externally).

Informed and inspired by Surrealism, textile design and the decorative arts, the paintings are executed in a graphic, minimal style against flat monochromatic color fields, suggesting elements of graffiti but also taking on the appearance of boldly designed fabric patterns.

The handwritten text used within the work as well as the titles, stem from song lyrics, segments of overheard conversation, poetry or artist musings that usually express a reciprocal romantic sentiment or pervasive sense of longing. At times the written language interacts with the biomorphic forms, allowing a narrative of sorts to exist. At other times it is arbitrary and functions simply as mark, as line, as decoration.

Gustavo Roman

Gustavo Román was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1974 and currently lives and works in Miami, Florida. He received a Bachelor of Humanities from the University of Puerto Rico in 1999, and a Masters of Fine Arts from Florida International University in 2007.

Román has a forthcoming solo show at David Castillo Gallery, Miami (2010), and had a recent solo at Ingalls and Associates Gallery, Miami (2007). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Apex Art, New York (2007), Frost Art Museum, Miami (2007), South Florida Art Center, Miami Beach (2007, 2005, 2004), and venues in Kansas City and Chicago.

His work is in the private collections of Francie Bishop Good, Mario Cader-Frech, and Richard Shack, among others.

Román’s body of work deals with the human psyche and its correlation with physical existence (or being), a study of humanity through its corporeal manifestation, the body, and its affect on experience.

Artist statement

Sexual tension, gender ambiguity and the myth of male sexual prowess are some recurrent themes I explore. A lot of my work speaks of an exaggerated sexuality, which renders itself useless achieving a state of ridicule, anti-sensual at best. The work is a hyperbole of our cultural ideas of sex and sensuality. It comments on the sensual body as a projection of the self, of identity and our cult of it. The work’s scale speaks of the private and personal, of intimacy and shyness, as well as the forbidden and taboo.

Lydia Rubio

Lydia Rubio had been producing her work for 25 years. She has had 13 solo shows and 55 group shows in the national and regional public and private institutions.

She is a recipient of the Pollock Krasner Fellowship in 2006, the State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Painting in 1994, and the Cintas Foundation Fellowship in 1982

Presently she is working on two large scale public art sculpture commissions, one for Terminal C of Raleigh Durham Airport and the other for The Woman Park in Miami Dade County. In 2002 she completed a public art commission by Dade County Art in Public Places of paintings, sculptures and text for the Port of Miami.

Her works have been published in periodicals like ARTNews, The Miami Herald, Americas Magazine OEAS, Harvard GSD Magazine, Hemispheres Magazine UA, Southern Accents and Elle Décor.

Ms. Rubio works are in the permanent collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the University of Southern California, the Wolfsonian FIU, the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Miami Dade Community College, Bryn Mawr College and Lehigh University Art Galleries and private collections in New York, Miami and Europe.

She was born in Havana, Cuba. She lived in Puerto Rico, Italy, Boston, and New York, and has traveled extensively in Europe and Mexico. Since 1987, she lives and works in Miami, Florida.

At Parsons School of Design in NYC she developed during a three year period, the Visual Thinking Studio, with the Dept. of Environmental Design. She has been invited as visiting artist to several fine arts programs in the state of Florida.

Lydia Rubio was a visiting critic in the architectural design studios at Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge for two years and a full time instructor at the University of Puerto Rico School of Architecture for five years.

Art is not only my life work it had been both my passion and my fundamental interest since I was a child. I come from a family of painters.

My work is inspired by poetry. Metaphors intrigue me; they are translations of life experiences, (for example flight as migration of transformation). I represent these ideas in two- and three-dimensional works interwoven into a language of my own.

Because of my love of books, I document my working process in journals. These books are often shown with or become part of the work and, as such, have become a number of important book collections. Sometimes they are the crucible for a body of work.

Being an artist in the 21st century means to me, adopting multiple cultural references and producing works that are united by a dominant conceptual system or approach. My personal interests and the curiosity I apply to investigate the means of expression and continuous change in art are more important to me, than being bound to specific media, a set of repetitive images or a static style.

My work is generally expressed in a sequence or in a series, which may include narrative, texts, themes, letters, or numbers. I look to understand the static and the changing, i.e., movement and change in imagery as they imitate transformations in life. The multi-paneled paintings of various installations allow the viewer to interact and, therefore, extend the work beyond the studio.

I innately understand space and scale, which has facilitated large-scale public art projects which include text, paintings, and sculptures. My sculpture is constructed, planar, assembled.

Through art I discover. Curiosity is the generator of change I my work.

Veronica Scharf Garcia

Jonathan Small

Sara Stites

Gretchen Wagoner

I focus on structural relationships. Through drawing, I aim to demonstrate the personality of various natural phenomena by defining their relative condition with one another. By using a mixture of medium including charcoal, graphite, pen, ink, acrylic, and water, I capture the layered characteristic of evolution so that every mark and erasure symbolically plays a role in describing both classical and modern issues such as the Fibonacci Series and globalization. I then seek to correlate the development of these evolutionary human attributes with the status of certain natural structures, such as natural selection and entropy, therefore questioning the "nature" of these attributes.

Sara Stites, originally a New Yorker, lives and works in Miami. She will have a one person exhibit coming up this year at Broward College. Her work has recently been shown in New York and Paris where she is represented by Helenbeck Gallery.

Stites’ work explores the boundaries of forms through the exploration of their limits and the changing aspects of their beginnings and endings. These works speak to nature’s endless capacity for growth and recursion. Playful scale-mixing is also an interest. The coexistence of big and small, detailed and smooth, intricate and simple is at work here. The viewer questions whether this is a miniscule world or one in outer space.

Gretchen Wagoner was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin; she currently lives and works in Long Island City, NY. Gretchen received her BFA in 1996 from the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. During her junior year she was juried into the “NY Studio Loft Program” which brought her to New York City for the first time. After that experience, she decided to move to NY full time, some 12 years ago. Gretchen’s work has been featured in publications in the United States and the Netherlands. Her work has been shown in Minneapolis, Chicago, Brooklyn, New Hampshire, Miami, and Canada.

I am fascinated with butterflies and knots. My interest lies in the delicate yet resilient characteristics of a butterfly as opposed to the robust and stabilizing mechanisms of a knot. Natural examples of conformity and a deviation; both are symbolically used to describe physical characteristics brought on by strong emotional reactions. Having butterflies or knots in your stomach may physically feel similar but evoke completely different emotional connotations.

Certain butterflies can adapt their appearance to their immediate surroundings for survival purposes. An invaluable skill for a survivalist is to be well versed in different types of knot making. Sustaining a continuous existence is often a staged illusion and you need to look at things a different way to see what is actually there. In the “Butterfly and Knot” series I sometimes utilize either white gouache on light grey paper or graphite on black paper causing the image to appear or disappear depending upon the angle of light striking the surface of the piece. The viewer’s relative vantage point perfectly symbolizes the conundrum between objects and their sensorial perception.

Sustainability Series: An installation of glass vessels systematically filled with seeds sprouting in water. Housed are an assortment of avocado, beet, yam, potato and radish roots. Diary of a Seed: Daily Drawings and Sketches of their growth patterns.

As artist, registrar and curator, Veronica Scharf Garcia also chairs the Art in Public Places program in Key Biscayne, Florida and served as panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts.