Chadwick Tolley

Paradise Found (5/8)

“I am interested in art that suggests a narrative,” says artist Chadwick Tolley. While he uses his personal experience as a point of reference for his prints, drawings, and collages,...

“I am interested in art that suggests a narrative,” says artist Chadwick Tolley. While he uses his personal experience as a point of reference for his prints, drawings, and collages,...

“I am interested in art that suggests a narrative,” says artist Chadwick Tolley. While he uses his personal experience as a point of reference for his prints, drawings, and collages,...

“I am interested in art that suggests a narrative,” says artist Chadwick Tolley. While he uses his personal experience as a point of reference for his prints, drawings, and collages,...

This painting is part of the Paradise body of work, a series that explores the layered and often contradictory meanings of the word itself. Boldly inscribed with the word “PARADISE,”...

Oil, wax, and collage on linen Signed and dated, verso This artwork is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City. Carl James Ferrero is an artist whose experimental paintings, ...

Titled after an episode of Star Trek, The Paradise Syndrome features new work by Sonny Assu. Combining Indigenous content with appropriated images and text from marine chart maps, covers from Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks, and science fiction television programs, this exhibition continues Assu’s exploration around the intersection of Indigenous Peoples and North American pop culture. In the Star Trek episode The Paradise Syndrome, Captain Kirk suffers from amnesia when he arrives on an alien planet, which is inhabited by a society of people who resemble Indigenous Peoples in North America. Kirk is found by a group of women who believe that he is a god and then take him back to their community. At the end of the episode, he is attacked when they realize he is not a god. Spock and McCoy are transported to his rescue, but in the midst of the conflict, a tribal priestess who Kirk developed a relationship with, is killed. In this exhibition, Assu presents two series of digitally altered prints inspired by fact and fiction. The first series depicts ovoids superimposed onto digital scans of paintings by Emily Carr and A.Y. Jackson, framed by gamebook covers. The prints feature alien forms descending, referencing a Star Trek: Voyager episode titled Tattoo. In this episode, Chakotay meets the Sky Spirits, aliens who visited Earth thousands of years ago. They met nomadic humans who had great respect for the land and other animals. The Sky Spirits were so impressed that they gifted the nomads with an inheritance that would allow them to thrive and protect their world. When the Sky Spirits returned thousands of years later, they found that the weapons and diseases of invaders from other lands had decimated the nomadic ‘Inheritors’. Chakotay’s tattoo was the mark of an Inheritor and signaled to the Sky Spirits that some of the Inheritors had survived. Assu’s gamebook prints expand on this fictional story, incorporating aspects of our colonial history in the Pacific Northwest. This exhibition is a playful investigation of challenging issues. By incorporating nostalgic gamebooks from the 1980s, Assu alludes to the discovery of his Kwawaka’wakw heritage, which has recently led him back to living in his ancestral land. The second series of Assu’s prints in this exhibition depict digital illustrations, inspired by Indigenous copper shield symbols, that are superimposed onto navigational marine maps...

Recently graduated from Pasadena’s legendary Art Center College of Design, Tom Baldwin created the series of inkjet prints Japanese Gardens in 1996 on his computer, using then-nascent graphics technology to "paint" his images on the computer screen. Baldwin embraced this technology and its accompanying printing process not just for the speed and ease of their use, but because the artist could achieve the absolute flatness that the principles of modernism preached but ultimately--because of the limitations of their tools--never reached. These colorful, semi-abstracted views of Japanese temple landscapes subtly, but radically redefine picture space. Baldwin shifts fore and backgrounds, giving equal weight to skies and hillsides. Endowing a lowly bush with a vibrant purple or orange might cause it to pop out of proportion, but ultimately lends balance and stability to the work itself, in short, returning the composition to its original, harmonious whole in keeping with the subject matter. these original prints employ a color scheme that seems more reminiscent of 1980s Japanese pop art beer advertisements...