Randall Mooers

TROPHY

My paintings begin with a serious sense of play, both in the staging and the creating of the compositions. It is at this beginning stage that I operate under the Dadaist dictate that “anything can be art”, and at the same time I seek out a balanced and harmonious composition by way of line, shape, and color. I work according to my whimsy, sometimes seeking to assert some form of narrative however personal or ambiguous, and other times I am simply satisfied with the hint of a human presence. Once I have my compositions the paintings then very quickly become about work, a very labor intensive work that forces me to focus my mind and slow things down (which I feel is relevant especially in this day and age of high-speed everything). A great amount of effort is spent on trying to get to the highest level of finish that is possible according to my current skill level. For inspiration I have drawn from the past four centuries of object specific paintings, from the ontbijtjes (laid tables) of the 17th Century Dutch masters such as Willem Kalf...

My paintings begin with a serious sense of play, both in the staging and the creating of the compositions. It is at this beginning stage that I operate under the Dadaist dictate that “anything can be art”, and at the same time I seek out a balanced and harmonious composition by way of line, shape, and color. I work according to my whimsy, sometimes seeking to assert some form of narrative however personal or ambiguous, and other times I am simply satisfied with the hint of a human presence. Once I have my compositions the paintings then very quickly become about work, a very labor intensive work that forces me to focus my mind and slow things down (which I feel is relevant especially in this day and age of high-speed everything). A great amount of effort is spent on trying to get to the highest level of finish that is possible according to my current skill level. For inspiration I have drawn from the past four centuries of object specific paintings, from the ontbijtjes (laid tables) of the 17th Century Dutch masters such as Willem Kalf...

My paintings begin with a serious sense of play, both in the staging and the creating of the compositions. It is at this beginning stage that I operate under the Dadaist dictate that...

My paintings begin with a serious sense of play, both in the staging and the creating of the compositions. It is at this beginning stage that I operate under the Dadaist dictate that “anything can be art”, and at the same time I seek out a balanced and harmonious composition by way of line, shape, and color. I work according to my whimsy, sometimes seeking to assert some form of narrative however personal or ambiguous, and other times I am simply satisfied with the hint of a human presence. Once I have my compositions the paintings then very quickly become about work, a very labor intensive work that forces me to focus my mind and slow things down (which I feel is relevant especially in this day and age of high-speed everything). A great amount of effort is spent on trying to get to the highest level of finish that is possible according to my current skill level. For inspiration I have drawn from the past four centuries of object specific paintings, from the ontbijtjes (laid tables) of the 17th Century Dutch masters such as Willem Kalf, Jan Davidsz de Heem, Abraham van Beijeren...

Calvert’s current paintings investigate the relationship between digital media and the reception and perception of images, and utilizes diverse technologies such as fresco, 3D modeling, AI and data manipulation through code. She is especially interested in the evolution of pictorial space. Today we view our screens and the world they occupy as a shallowly layered space of overlapping desktop windows. The picture plane has tilted up again from the flatbed to float in front of our eyes. Calvert’s paintings in turn depict an intermediate space, where the verticality of the still life paintings cohabitate with these digital panes. Dutch floral still life paintings encapsulate multiple concerns. Their subjects were botanical fantasies, emblems of an economic mirage that has contemporary corollaries. Most important to Calvert’s pictorial concerns, they depict ephemeral things in shallow and diagrammatic space - they are all foreground. They contain an abundance of visual information in overwhelming density, creating an allover resolution; a visual field that is equivalent to digital noise. By making painterly interventions into reproductions, Calvert attempts to dissolve the layer between the resolution of the source image and abstraction of the painted mark. ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ Tiffany Calvert has exhibited her work in the US and abroad including Lawrimore Project in Seattle, E.TAY Gallery in New York, the Speed Museum in Louisville and Cadogan Contemporary in London. Residencies include the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, I-Park, and ArtOmi International Arts Center where she received a Geraldine R. Dodge Fellowship. Calvert has received grants from the Great Meadows Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Her work was recently profiled by critic John Yau in the online journal Hyperallergic. Her curatorial projects include “Some Abstraction Occurs” at 65GRAND Gallery in Chicago and “Magic” at Mercer College (featuring work by Chris Martin, Karla Knight...

Miguel Padura El Abismo, 2009 Oil on canvas 40 x 58 in Miguel Padura was born in Havana in 1957. “I was four years old when my family moved to Rodas, in the province of Las Villas. ...

Zane York coaxes and cajoles with a bit of humor which belies a deeper sensitivity. His eye-catching subjects never fail to cause a double-take. In our age of nearly constant visual ...

As an artist, TIFFANY CALVERT applies contemporary painting techniques to historical imagery. Her recent work uses the seventeenth-century Dutch floral still life as a springboard fo...