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Infinity series (Apparition)

The mysterious and powerful images in this body of work capture fleeting “visitations” from the spirit world –visions as they might appear in dreams or heightened states of wakefulness. The photographs are made using Armstrong's unique process of re-working found images and photographing them extremely out of focus. In this case, the original sources materials are reproductions of Roman sculpture shot with camera lens set at infinity.

The meanings underpinning Apparition radiate in a number of directions. While many of the images are dark, ghoulish visions, others are hopeful spiritual presences. For Armstrong, the ghosts of ancient Rome represent particularly appropriate messengers for our time, as we contemplate the fate of our own empire.

Born in 1962 and raised in Point Pleasant, NJ, Begonia received his MFA in Painting from Yale in 1987, and his BFA in Painting and Teaching Certification from Temple University's Tyler School of Art in 1984.

Since 1992, Begonia has exhibited work in more than thirty solo and group shows in Philadelphia, New York, and New Jersey. He has been represented by Larry Becker Contemporary Art since 1997.

Begonia's first solo show at Larry Becker in 2000, "Toward An Endless Summer" -- an overview of his work circa 1992 - 2000, presented an aesthetic specific to the beach and beach culture, while both playfully and reverently paying homage to some favorite Modern Masters (e.g. Mondrian, Malevich, and Agnes Martin). During this period, Begonia employed drawing and collage techniques as his preferred media, with acrylic and phosphorescent paints used moderately.

In 2003, Begonia presented a group of oil on canvas "abstract seascapes" and Taoist texts painted on driftwood in a solo show ("I Drift Like A Wave On The Ocean") at the Abington Art Center.

The "Blue, Period" (2004 - 2006) paintings are abstract seascapes; horizontal, monochrome oils on canvas (9" x 12") with color-field images suggestive of the ocean as evoked by memory or the imagination, and always subject to formal concerns. Because applying blue paint in horizontal strokes to a white ground will produce the effect of water, Begonia's challenge was to create something singular and compelling within those self-imposed formal limits.

In the year 1073, Painter and theorist Kuo His asked, "Why do people love landscape?" and answered,  "Hills and gardens restore our nature (chi), so we should visit them often".

Painting for me has always been a means of approaching and understanding the natural world both as we find it and how we apprehend and reconfigure it. The rational construct of the framing rectangle provides limitless interpretive space in which to experience multiple realities. I am particularly interested in creating work with the power to suggest experience rather than define it, where engagement is, in a sense, physical and one enters the painting as one might enter a forest or take the first step on a path. My current work focuses on the ephemeral nature of light as seen through the lens of an abstract painting practice that is at once critical and meditative, formal and yet deeply rooted in the seen. I think of paintings as places that one can revisit often as one would a favorite mountain, tree, garden, or building.

- Julian Jackson

Julian Jackson's new abstractions from the series ‘the Elements' are not so unlike the paintings that came before. They have the same refined, sensitive touch that is almost more felt than visible, the same inflected, slightly unfocused luminosity, a glow both natural and cinematic that suggests more idyllic times and places. That said, the new paintings have also changed radically, if radical is not too abrupt a word for work that is so mulled over, so carefully conceived and executed. One point of departure is that they are no longer abstracted architectural interiors based on a grid but skyscapes or pastorals instead, mediated through the history of art, channeling the spirit of Tiepolo and Constable, say, especially in their respective depictions of the celestial. Jackson has also brightened his palette considerably, taking as his main subjects light (as always) and cosmic spaces filled with hovering, softly blurred globes of elusive color. The scale, accordingly, has expanded. Jackson said that they were a return, of sorts, to paintings he had made ten years ago for his father, soon after he died. At the time, he wanted to paint images of the night sky, since Jackson had always thought of his father as a special star.

These canvases, however, are not about night. Instead, they are extraordinarily buoyant, celebratory even, like champagne, but held together by an understated structure that lends ballast and formal tension. The rich colors layered between more nuanced shades, the stream and sensation of billowing clouds (you suspect that if you blew on them they would shift direction) are anchored by Jackson's meticulous—if intuitive—placement of various-sized, variously shaped and colored globes, some opaque, others diaphanous but all radiant. They constitute the path he wants your eye to travel. Ryoanji , titled after the famous Japanese temple, is emblematic of Jackson's profound and longstanding interest in Asian art. Its format is an extended horizontal rectangle, the field a lovely, light-shimmered, barely-there green. A bundled shape of wine and other softened blue-reds occupies the left side and seems to be irresistibly drawn to a gorgeous poppy-red bloom with an unexpected blue center on the right, a compositional trope that occurs in other paintings as shapes attract each other. But it is the color of the ground that is the most alluring, like the light under a leaf or the pale froth of beaten tea, then delicately warmed, cooled and bound with a creaminess that is utterly seductive. Arc, while smaller than Ryoanji, has a similar rectangular format and is a yellow-orange-green filtered through other colors. It features a uneven bridge of golden orange ovals that traverses the painting. Solar is bolder, sultry, suffused with golds, reds, violets, always touched by some shade of blue here or there, some greens and suggests heat, high summer (as do most of these paintings; Jackson says you can pretty much tell what season of the year he has made a painting in) while Flare is also seductively warm, balanced by cools, consisting of many gradations and shades of oranges, corals, reds, with one red that is particular arresting, glowing with jeweled clarity. Moment, on the other hand, looks like pure sky, only more perfect, more pink, blue and white, full of racing, flirtatious rococo clouds and while there are no putti visible, it seems their kind of habitat. As is evident, Jackson believes that sky is one of the most beautiful things that exist.

As the result of expert, elegant crafting and close observation of phenomena, the formal pleasures of these pitch-perfect paintings are many: the complex interplay of color and light, the mutable relationship of the shapes that seem to crowd and disperse, gently pushing and pulling against each other, the rhythms, the ambiguous, indeterminate space. But Jackson also prefers to see them in more experiential ways, as the outcome of personal events in his life, as a means to understand the natural world. He is not a theorist and he would like to seize something from the flux of life, to link his art with primal, current experience. He also thinks of painting as a place to enter as “one might a forest” and to “revisit often as one would a favorite mountain, tree, garden, or building.”

These paintings, he said, in a recent studio visit, are the ongoing ripple effect of an epiphany he experienced several years ago at an artist's residency. He had spent a month there, mostly among the trees, looking at the light filtering through the leaves. It helped him see other possibilities, other directions for his work, a quiet shift that still inspires him, that still refreshes his practice. It also resurrected memories of childhood summers. During those summers, he spent a lot of time in trees, gazing upward, the hazy, spangled light falling down on him through the leaves, like a blessing.

Lilly Wei

(Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent curator, essayist and critic who writes regularly for Art in America and is a contributing editor at ARTnews and Art Asia Pacific.)

DRAGONFLY DAY, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, NY
THE APPARENT STILLNESS OF SMALL SPACES; new paintings , Kathryn Markel Fine Art, NYC, NY

ABSTRACT NEW YORK, Klein Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
ESTATE 2003, from the Narrative to the Minimal , Holzpavilion, Mirabellgarten, Salzburg, Austria
SAFIR INTERNATIONAL, Triest, Italy
KENTLER BENEFIT, Kentler International Drawing Center, Brooklyn, NY
PAPER 2003, Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY

+LIFE, M% Gallery, Cleveland, Ohio
LESS THAN ONE, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, NY
BEAUTY, Exhibit A, Soho, NYC, NY
MUTATIONS, Mastel+Mastel Gallery, Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY
2002 AMERICAN ABSTRACT ARTISTS, Martin Art Gallery, Muhlenberg College, Allentown PA
REARRANGED, Barbara Greene Fine Art, Chelsea, NYC, NY
ON THE WATERFRONT, curated by Frantiska & Tim Gilman-Sevcik/Flash Art, Borough Hall, Brooklyn,NY
PIER SHOW 10, Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, Brooklyn, NY
WORKS ON PAPER, Kentler International Drawing Center, Brooklyn, NY
AFFORDABLE ART FAIR- NYC, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Hudson Piers, NYC, NY

AQUA MARINE, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, NY
COLOR AID, Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY
NEW PAINTINGS, D.U.M.B.O Arts Festival, Brooklyn, NY
PIER SHOW 9, Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, Brooklyn NY
NATURE REVISITED, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, NY
WORKS ON PAPER, Kentler International Drawing Center, Brooklyn, NY
NATIONAL SMALL WORKS EXHIBITION,Selected by David Bietzel, Schoharie County Arts Council
SPECTRA, Installation & Paintings, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Mt. San Angelo, VA

Born: Cleveland, OH 1950

Born in Albuquerque, NM, 1974

Alexandra Pacula was born in Poland in 1979 and at the age of fourteen moved to The United States together with her family. She is a New York based artist and works in a studio in Brooklyn. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers the State University of New Jersey in 2002 and finished a Master of Fine Arts degree at Montclair State University of New Jersey. Her work has been included in many exhibitions around the US as well as Spain and London.

Alexandra usually works on a large scale and explores the anxieties and conditioning inherent in being human. Her vigorous painterly scenes of urban nightlife offer an insight to human interactions, seductions and desires.  Pacula's ideas are inspired by her immediate surroundings and personal experiences and observations.

The language of abstraction comes from the life collective; everything one has seen, heard and experienced. For me the vehicle is in paint as it translates into line, color, mood and atmosphere.

The process of construction and deconstruction is deciphering the dialogue. The images are not generally preconceived and so require a journey. Phases of construction and deconstruction continue throughout until the final image is exposed.

The finality of the painting is predicated and decided by the element of surprise that the image gives back to me. At this point the painting takes on a life of its own and I become the viewer, no longer a participant in the work.

-James Woodruff, 2008

Marc Yankus' fine art and publishing experience span a period of more than twenty-nine years. His work has been included in exhibitions at The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; Exit Art, New York City; The Library of Congress, Washington, DC; and recently at ClampArt, New York City. Yankus' artwork has graced the covers of books by Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, and Alan Hollinghurst, among many others. His images have also been used for theatrical posters for such acclaimed Broadway shows as Jane Eyre ; August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom ; and John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize winning play, Doubt . Additionally, Yankus' photographs have appeared both on the covers and inside the pages of numerous publications ranging from The Atlantic Monthly to Photo District News .

“The Point Of Secret,” ClampArt, New York City
“Marc Yankus,” Linstrum + Matre Artworks, Atlanta

“Photography Now 2008,” Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York (Curated by Darren Ching)

“Best of Arles: From Artists Around the World,” Farmani Gallery, Los Angeles
“Photo Folio Winner,” Les Rencontres d'Arles, Arles, France
“Degrees of Separation – The Summer Portrait Salon,” Peer Gallery, New York City
“The Evolution of the Digital Portrait ,” ClampArt, New York City
“Joyce Elaine Grant Photography Exhibition,” Visual Arts Department Fine Arts
Gallery at Texas Woman's University, Denton, Texas
“photo l.a.,” ClampArt booth, Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Santa Monica, California

“photo miami,” SOHO Building, Miami, Florida
“Public/Private,” Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York City
“It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. You know what I mean?,” ClampArt, New York City
“12 th Annual Juried Exhibition,” Griffin Museum of Photography, Wincester, MA (Juried by Bonni Benrubi)
“Small Works,” 80 Washington Square East Galleries, New York City (Curated by Jack Shainman) “photo s.f.,” Photographers' Gallery booth, Fort Mason Center / Festival Pavilion, San Francisco, CA
“photo l.a.,” ClampArt booth, Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Santa Monica, CA.

“Summer Show,” ClampArt, New York City
“Group Show,” Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle, Washington
“Group Show,” Elaine Fleck Gallery, Toronto

“September 11th: Acquisitions,” Library of Congress, Department of Prints and Photographs, Washington, DC
“Witness,” Exit Art, New York City
“Deep Beauty,” Ciao Bella, Brooklyn, New York

Jill Waterman, “Night & Low-Light Photography,” PDN Pros Book (2008), pp. 178-180.
“A New Path Taken – Interview with Marc Yankus,” DoubleExposure.com (December 2007)
Shots 97 (October 2007), illus.
“Yankus Melds Traditional and Digital Photo Techniques into a Sensual, Evocative Whole,” Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, (April 20, 2007)
“Exhibition Focus,” Focus , (December, 2006), color illus.
“The Place to Be,” Leica World, (November, 2006), color illus.
Shots 93, (August 2006), illus.
“Past and Present,” The New York Sun (July 28-30, 2006), color illus.
“Marc Yankus,” The New Yorker (June 26, 2006), p. 12
“Marc Yankus and Loretta Lux,” New York Press (June 14, 2006), Vol. 19, Issue 24
“Marc Yankus: Time and Again,” ZOOZOOM.com (June 5, 2006), illus.
“Marc Yankus: Time and Again,” Visual Arts Briefs (May 5, 2006), illus.
“Marc Yankus,” Communication Arts (2003)
“Marc Yankus' Little Yellow Book,” Photo District News (2002)
“Portfolio,” Photo District News (2000)
“Publish or Perish,” American Photography (1995)
“Expert Graphics,” MacWorld Magazine (1995)
“Electronic Collage,” MacUser (1992)
Contemporary Graphic Artists (1988)
“The Dream Juxtapositions of Marc Yankus,” American Institute of Architecture Journal (1982)
ARTSPEAK (1981)

Nate Lippens, “Yankus melds traditional and digital photo techniques into a sensual, evocative whole,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer (April 19, 2007)
Vince Aletti, Review, The New Yorker (June 2006)
Viola Salzedo-Gramm, “Manipulating Youth,” New York Press (June 2006)
Anne Telford, “Marc Yankus,” Communication Arts (April 2003)
Elizabeth Forst, “The Right Stuff,” pdn (March 2002)
Jacqueline Tobin, Portfolio, pdn PIX (August 2000)
Jieun Oh, “Creator,” designNET (August 2000)

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

ClampArt, New York City
Griffin Museum, Wincester, Massachusetts

Education:
1977-1981 School of Visual Arts, BFA, New York City
1973-1975 High School of Art and Design, New York City

CLICK ON A NAME TO GO TO THEIR STATEMENT, RESUME, OR BIO