February 4,
2011
FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
Orion
Shepherd
February 18 - March 19,
2011
Opening Friday, February 18th,
6-9pm
Jancar Jones Gallery is pleased to announce
an exhibit of new work by San Francisco-based artist Orion Shepherd. The
show will include a combination of drawings, paintings, and collages in found
frames.
Conceived of as a response to a collection
of gold and silver-colored thrift store frames, [UTF-8?]Shepherd’s current
body of
work addresses the mechanisms by which the work of art has become delineated.
Through drawn or collaged studies of institutional apparatuses such as
museum and gallery floors bounded by mock gilt plaster and metal frames, he
emphasizes structures that are intended to be ignored or overlooked. Using
a combination of Greek, Neoclassical, and Catholic iconography, he
simultaneously traces and places the history of high art within the context
of modern, mass produced referents, paradoxically combining the banal and the
sublime.
Shepherd deliberately imitates a sense of
the highly ornamented frames typical in the presentation of Renaissance
masterworks, in spite of the contemporary trend to deemphasize or remove the
frame, all together. He asserts that the frame, regardless of form, still
remains as a convention by which to elevate that which is framed. By
inverting emphasis, favoring the frame over the artwork his choice of
subjects (1960s picture postcards of the Los Angeles County Museum, images of
Greek ruins clipped from issues of National Geographic, and side-by-side
portraits of football coach Bill Walsh and the pope) maintain a level of
irreverent nostalgia and history consistent with the frames themselves.
Although depicting historical monuments and figures, the print quality of the
collaged elements consciously contradict the original, perhaps awe-inspiring,
subject, suggesting a kitschy sentimentality as opposed to opulent reverence.
While the frames, at the time of their production, were meant to evoke a
sense of the richness and beauty of the [UTF-8?]“classical,” the benign
neglect
of such cheap, disposable objects over time has inevitably functioned to
heighten their value as modern
ruins.
Orion Shepherd received his BFA from the
California College of the Arts, San Francisco. His work has been exhibited
at Adobe Books, Needles and Pens, Mollusk, Park Life, Baer Ridgway
Exhibitions and the Luggage Store Gallery, all in San
Francisco.
For more information please contact
Eric Renehan Jones or Ava Jancar at info@jancarjones.com or visit www.jancarjones.com. Gallery hours: Thursday -
Saturday, noon - 6pm and by
appointment.
