Monica Zeringue

Narcissus

2014

Laura Tanner Graham's drawings and installations are often discussed as part of the Southern Gothic literary tradition, sharing similar themes with authors such as Flannery O’Connor ...

Luis Cruz Azaceta is a Cuban American painter. Since the late 1970s, his paintings and drawings have been taking the moral and ethical pulse of Cuba. For Azaceta, art is not a vehicl...

ANASTASIA PELIAS was born in New Orleans, LA to Greek parents. Her artistic practice is rooted in the dual cultural identity of both her native and ancestral roots in New Orleans, LA...

medium: graphite on claybord Monica Zeringue received her MFA from the University of New Orleans in 2006, and her BA in 1993. In 1999 she was awarded the Prix de l'Acadamie de Par...

LAURA TANNER GRAHAM’s drawings and installations are often discussed as part of the Southern Gothic literary tradition, sharing similar themes with authors such as Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. As a Georgia native, Graham’s work seeks to understand the ways in which pattern and printed textiles are informed by social and political movements. Her narratives are tightly bound to antebellum traditions while balancing the changing ideals of the new generation of southern society. Graham received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BFA from Florida State University. She has exhibited nationally in both group and solo exhibitions including the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Athens Institute of Contemporary Art. She has also been a visiting artist at Tulane University and Valdosta State University. In 2016, Graham was awarded a fellowship and residency at the Ucross Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center. Graham is currently living and making work in Tucson, AZ. STATEMENT Firmly grounded in America’s expansive colonial history, my work interrogates how Southern culture has been idealized as “quintessential America” and the bedrock of traditional American values. Using my familiarity and position within Southern culture, I have created a new visual literacy to demonstrate how America’s nostalgia for tradition has been manipulated in an effort to isolate and disenfranchise. My drawings act as a visual archive of research that examines the consequences of American colonialism and addresses the sense of white fragility that continues to pervade Western culture. In the midst of widespread anxiety over the collective American identity, there has been a revival of many of the country’s unresolved historical battles, including contentious race relations, sexism, nativism, and an ever-growing wage gap. I employ the Americana aesthetic of the old South to parallel historical and contemporary acts of resistance to racial, economic, and gender diversity. Borrowing directly from the decorative arts, the meticulously hand-cut mylar and equally intricate drawing capitalizes on America’s propensity for nostalgia to lure the viewer into confronting injustices through the detached lens of that which has already happened. Through a combination of appropriated and invented imagery, my work contextually constructs contemporary accounts of systemic marginalization, executed under the guise of leisure, embellishment and luxury. The dense visual language invites investigation into the textured surfaces and leads the viewer to reflect on the social textures of contemporary culture while questioning their own complicity in current social constructs. Sourcing from period- specific textiles, turn-of-the-century advertisements, campaign posters, and found family photographs, the collaged images create a singular narrative composition that document the cyclical and systemic nature of marginalization in America. The methodology with which the drawings are constructed echoes historical layers of rules, regulations and hierarchies that are stitched into dominant white American myths. The resulting drawings are indexical in nature, recording the parallels between topics of current debate and 18th century Western expansionism. The disconnect between the delicate nature of the work and the unresolved cultural tensions that it reveals provides a visual record of the inconsistencies of American idealism. My current project explores the South as the embodiment of America’s pastoral traditions and values that are at the center of the “Make America Great Again” movement, a movement which has both exploited and is at odds with a social ideal that simultaneously proclaims itself to be “post- racial” and “post- gender” while identifying with a “pull-yourself-up-by-the-boot-straps” mentality. As one of the earliest colonized areas, the South is often portrayed as a region of racial and gender stability in the face of impending change. I am currently working with research institutions in the South to further understand how the architectural structure of the Southern plantation...

RUTH OWENS graduated in 2018 with an MFA from the University of New Orleans after leaving her medical practice of 25 years. She is represented by Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, and belong...

At over 11 feet in length, Broadbent’s “Andromeda” galaxy watercolor painting captures the spectacle and wonder one feels when looking at the stars in the night sky. In this large sc...

87"x149" multi-panel installation. This watercolor painting installation is created on 36 paper panels and is inspired by a view of the moon. The dee...

Rat King Augury (Round Pastel Drawing on Indian Handmade Cotton Paper by Kahn & Selesnick) 41 inch diameter, unframed pastel, conte crayon on paper Kahn & Sel...

Art in America Sarah S. King July 2003 Komarin’s most successful works are serial - such as the Pop-artish “cake” images - in which versions of a crudely outlined central image are...

Artwork size: 67 x 51 cm. Frame size: 112 x 97 cm. Free shipment worldwide. Archive number SF 89-153 in the Sam Francis Foundation. Stamped with the Sam Francis Estate logo and stamped signature on verso. Sam Francis’s paintings are a journey into a dream, a voyage into the landscapes of the soul where colours are lights on fire. Alongside names such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, Sam Francis is an artist who has succeeded in demonstrating a total mastery of abstract expressionism’s impassioned and spontaneous genre. The explosions of colour – red, blue, green and yellow – the streaks, strokes and bold lines of his pictures are the physical synthesis of the deepest crevices of the soul. His colours create rhythmical motifs that, characteristically enough, can be called the “musicality” of his paintings. The work of Sam Francis provides a visible meeting place for the conscious and the unconscious. His pictures are the cross-fertilisation of what has already been experienced with what exists still only as desire, a struggle between melancholy and merrymaking. Influenced by C.G. Jung, the father of psychoanalysis, Sam Francis spent a large portion of his life exploring the premise that dreams, instincts and intuition provide, the keys which unlock the mysteries and meaning of our inner lives. He was also fascinated by the four ancient elements – earth, water, air and fire – which developed into a leitmotif in his work. Sam Francis was born in San Mateo in California, USA in 1923. After starting to paint at the age of around twenty, he soon found himself increasingly consumed by the power of art. He spent much of the 1950s in Paris, from where he not only made frequent excursions to a number of European cities, but also embarked on many journeys to South America and Asia. He continued to move from place to place, primarily in the USA and Japan, right up until his death in 1994. Sam Francis’s first...

Black Sky (The Cave Series), 3 graphite on paper 77 x 112 cm