New York
City,
April 14,
2011....Awakening features the most recent oil paintings by artist Jenny Nelson and mixed
media collage by KeunYoungPark.
Awakening
celebrates the
beginning of spring, when the earth and its inhabitants come alive with lush
greenery, blue skies, chirping birds, and a sense of optimism for the future.
Though both
Nelson and Park re-create the natural beauty they see around them, their visions
take very different paths. Nelson's oils suggest abstract
landscapes, painted in earthy pastel tones - greens, blues, teals and browns,
with occasional accents of orange which might suggest a wildflower.
A bold grey stroke leaves the viewer with a sense of rocks, or
permanence. And her use of blue reflects her affinity for
water. Nelson is also influenced by spaces where she creates
her work, such as studios in barns, sheds and en pleine air in the countryside.
Nelson applies
layer upon layer of paint and scrapes the canvas with her favored device - a
small and narrow triangular palate knife - to get a sense of depth and subtle
color bleeding that gives the sensation of movement, as in a stream or
cloud-filled sky. Creating both large and small works, Ms.
Nelson lets the viewer interpret the exact place or moment, and know that they
are witnessing the earth at its
finest.
Park has created mixed media collages made of photographs cut into
thousands of tiny pieces which she then re-assembles onto paper where they are
then mounted and framed under glass. Her recent works of micro-collage and paper mosaic
capture the tremor of unstable presence. Park takes pictures
of parts of the body or face, changes the color and saturation of those images
by photoshopping, prints them out on paper, then tears the pictures and pastes
them back together piece-by-piece.
Painstakingly,
she creates images of people morphing gradually into trees and flora, their
bodies magically transformed into composites of the human and of natural
elements. However improbable this might seem, the marriage of
the androgynous form and nature here seems normal and somehow even expected
because of the graceful depictions and the extremely detailed work.
Using beautiful colors and creating depth and shadows with the collage,
her work seems to burst with energy and
exuberance.
Both Nelson's
and Park's works, inspired by nature, are graceful and elegant, and create for
the viewer an anticipation for and a visual celebration of
spring.
Jenny
Nelson
Of her work,
Nelson
states:
Although my early artistic training was focused on the classical and
representational, it has always been my natural instinct to depict my
surroundings in abstract forms. Most of the paintings evolve as an intuitive
reaction to my surroundings... To evoke this kind of sensory
memory in my work I apply many layers of paint, using gesture and an internal
sense of color. Traces of previous layers will remain visible, allowing colors
to interact in ways I could not have anticipated. In this way a composition is
arrived at through a series of decisions that are both conscious and
unconscious. With great sensitivity to these evolving colors and forms, a very
personal abstract language emerges. Focusing on particular shapes or
compositions for long periods of time will often result in a series of closely
related paintings, which have fully explored my current
interest.
Nelson has been
exhibiting in solo and group shows for the past ten years.
She attended Maine College of Art in Portland, and
received a BFA from BardCollege, where she
received a scholarship to the LacosteSchool of the Arts in
France. She was an artist in
resident at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony from 2004-2008, and has been an instructor
at the Woodstock School of Art from 2009 through the present.
Her work hangs in private and public collections throughout the
country. Nelson lives and works in Woodstock, New
York.
KeunYoungPark
Of her
inspirations and process, Park
states:
In my work, I reflect upon the astatic character of
existence in the flow of time as well as the opposite sides of nature - negative
and positive, construction and destruction, presence and absence, and life and
death. I believe that everything is constantly changing,
either being generated or destroyed. Presence is just a state
of being and the reality of an object has ambiguity in this shifting. Through
this process of breaking down photo images and recomposing them, figures have
thousands of tiny particles and textures that make the images look blurry and
tremulous.
The pieces featured in
Awakening are Park's most recent works, from her "Dream
Series". Here Keun reveals a more narrative story than in her
past work, imagining a territory, as she describes, which is "beyond
consciousness"--- an awakening of the human
spirit.
Born and raised
in Seoul, Korea, Park
received her BFA and MFA from SeoulNationalUniversity.
After working and exhibiting her work throughout Seoul, she relocated to
Brooklyn five years ago, and began showing her work in galleries and exhibiting
her work in art fairs throughout the U.S. She has also
competed in and received first prize in numerous juried shows.
She was the recipient of last year's A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship, and won
the Curator's Choice Award at ATAO in New York in
2008. This is Park's first exhibition at Tria
Gallery.
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