Stuart Sheldon

Heart of Darkness

2016

One of a kind Mixed Medium on Canvas Artwork: Original abstract mixed media work on canvas, which combines new media - digital original hand painting, printed on canvas, then hand p...

One of a kind Mixed Medium on Canvas Artwork: Original abstract mixed media work on canvas, which combines new media - digital original hand painting, printed on canvas, then hand ...

Miriam Schapiro, "Curtain Call" 2002 Hand signed, dated and titled verso and signed and dated recto. acrylic paint, digital images, glitter and textile fabric on canvas, tooling with gold leaf embossing around self edge of painting. size: 60 x 50 in Miriam Schapiro (or Mimi Schapiro) (November 15, 1923 – June 20, 2015) was a Canadian-born artist based in America. She was a painter, sculptor and printmaker. She was a pioneer of feminist art. She was also considered a leader of the Pattern and Decoration art movement. Schapiro's artwork blurs the line between fine art and craft. Her paintings contain craft elements because crafts and decoration is associated with women and femininity. She used icons that are associated with women such as hearts, floral decorations, geometric patterns and the color pink. In the 1970s she made a small woman's object, the fan, heroic by painting it six feet by twelve feet. This bears the influence of the Pattern and Decoration movement artists such as Brad Davis, Mary Grigoriadis, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnel, Sonya Rapoport, Miriam Schapiro and Valerie Jaudon. Shapiro was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her father was an industrial design artist who fostered her desire to be an artist and served as her role model and mentor. Her mother was a stay at home mother who worked part-time during the depression. As a teenager, Schapiro was taught by Victor d’Amico, her first modernist teacher at the Museum of Modern Art. In the evenings she joined WPA classes for adults to study drawing from the nude model. In 1943, Schapiro entered Hunter College in New York City, but eventually transferred to the University of Iowa. At the University of Iowa, Schapiro studied painting with Stuart Edie and James Lechay. She studied printmaking under Mauricio Lasansky and was his personal assistant, which then led her to help form the Iowa Print Group. Lasanky taught his students to use several different printing techniques in their work and to study the masters' work in order to find solutions to technical problems. At the State University of Iowa she met the artist Paul Brach, whom she married in 1946.. By 1951 they moved to New York City and befriended many of the Abstract expressionist artists of the New York School, including Joan Mitchell, Larry Rivers, Knox Martin and Michael Goldberg. Schapiro worked in the style of Abstract expressionism during this time period. Shapiro and Brach lived in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. During this period Shapiro had a successful career as an abstract expressionist painter in the hard-edge style. In December 1957, André Emmerich selected one of her paintings for the opening of his gallery. Schapiro not only honored the craft tradition in women's art, but also paid homage to women artists of the past. In the early 1970s she made paintings and collages which included photo reproductions of Mary Cassatt's and Georgia O'keefe's paintings. Early in her career, Schapiro started looking for maternal symbols to unify her own roles as a woman. Her series, Shrines (1963), was her first artistically successful attempt at compartmentalizing her life roles. Her painting, Big Ox No. 1, from 1968, references Shrines, however no longer compartmentalized. The center O takes on the symbol of the egg which exists as the window into the maternal structure with outstretched limbs. Her series, Shrines was created in 1961–63. It is one of her earliest group of work that was also an autobiography. Each section of the work show an aspect of being a woman artist. They are also symbolic of her body and soul. In 1964 Schapiro and her husband Paul both worked at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. One of Schapiro's biggest turning points in her art career was working at the workshop and experimenting with Josef Albers' Color-Aid paper, where she began making several new shrines and created her first collages. In the 1970s, Schapiro and Brach moved to California so that both could teach in the art department at the University of California. Subsequently, she was able to establish the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia with Judy Chicago. The program set out to address the problems in the arts from an institutional position. They wanted the creation of art to be less of a private, introspective adventure and more of a public process through consciousness raising sessions, personal confessions and technical training. She participated in the Womanhouse exhibition in 1972. Schapiro's smaller piece within Womanhouse, called "Dollhouse", was constructed using various scrap pieces to create all the furniture and accessories in the house. Each room signified a particular role a woman plays in society and depicted the conflicts between them. Along with Nancy Spero, Joan Snyder, Joyce Kozloff, Audrey Flack and Judy Chicago, she is from that first generation of Jewish American feminist women artists and includes Judaica in her work. Schapiro's work from the 1970s onwards consists primarily of collages assembled from fabrics, which she called "femmages". As Schapiro traveled the United States giving lectures, she would ask the women she met for a souvenir. These souvenirs would be used in her collage like paintings. Her 1977-1978 essay Waste Not Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled - FEMMAGE (written with Melissa Meyer) describes femmage as the activities of collage, assemblage, découpage and photomontage practised by women using "traditional women's techniques - sewing, piercing, hooking, cutting, appliquéing, cooking and the like..." She was involved in Abstract expressionism, Minimalism, Computer art, and Feminist art. She worked with collage, printmaking, painting, femmage [fr] – using women's craft in her artwork, and sculpture. Schapiro not only honored the craft tradition in women's art, but also paid homage to women artists of the past. In the early 1970s she made paintings and collages which included photo reproductions of past artists such as Mary Cassatt. In the mid 1980s she painted portraits of Frida Kahlo on top of her old self-portrait paintings. In the 1990s Schapiro began to include women of the Russian Avant Garde in her work. The Russian Avant Garde was an important moment in Modern Art history for Schapiro to reflect on because women were seen as equals. Schapiro also did collaborative art projects, like her series of etchings Anonymous was a Woman from 1977. She was able to produce the series with a group of nine women studio-art graduates from the University of Oregon. Each print is an impression made from an untransformed doily that was placed in soft ground on a zinc plate, then etched and printed. Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson...

Elizabeth Riley’s work addresses questions concerning the complex and changing world we inhabit and our “mixed reality,” living between physical and digital/virtual contexts – are we our everyday, familiar, material past, or our digital future, and is this apparent “mixed reality” of the moment to be embraced or resisted. Is the digital present the bells and whistles of an unchanged and familiar humanity or does it define us, and the future. This project is embodied in tabletop cityscapes, structural wall works and installations including video, inkjet-printed video stills, and found home furnishings. Other continuing threads at play in my body of work are the struggle to overcome oppression as a woman – and a relationship with the urban environment and constructed space, as both personal and paradigmatic space. Exhibited in Excessive Frugalities, Digital Feet and Rocking Posture are three dimensional wall works made from multicolored video stills inkjet-printed on paper, and paint on the tough mylar-like material, duralar. These work combine illusionistic space with constructed elements in a multidimensional mashup of traditional and new mediums. . A long time New Yorker, Elizabeth Riley graduated from Barnard College and received an MFA from Hunter College. In April 2017, the site-specific participatory installation, City Remix, appeared in the exhibition Reconstruct at LIU, in Brooklyn, and in June 2017 the 20 x 20 ft installation, Paper Dragons, Broolyn, which functions as a walk-in, physical video, appeared in Bigger Bolder Better at 470 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn, sponsored by Chashama. In 2016 a multipart tabletop cItyscape, Video City, appeared in the exhibition, Land, Air, Place at Project ARTspace in Manhattan. In 2014-2015 large-scale installations by the artist appeared in exhibitions of site-specific work in Brooklyn at Storefront Ten Eyck, curated by Karin Bravin, and in Atlanta and Duluth, Georgia presented by Dashboard. In 2011-2013 her work was exhibited in a number of 2- and 3-person shows or screenings, including at Kijdome, Boston, and dB Visual Artist Series / Dungeon Beach, Storefront Bushwick, Creon Gallery and Studio Salon curated by David Gibson, all in New York City. Groups shows include exhibitions at Denise Bibro Fine Arts, Lesley Heller Workspace, Van Der Plas Gallery, Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Norte Maar, Associated Gallery, Brooklyn Fire Proof, Active Space, Sugar in Bushwick, NY Studio Gallery, Sideshow Gallery, PS 122, and Nurtureart. Elizabeth Riley's videos have appeared in screenings at home and abroad, including venues in England, Madrid, Copenhagen and Berlin. She was awarded a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship in 2014 and has been honored with twelve artist residencies, including the Heliker-Lahotan Residency, Great Cranberry Island...