Posts Tagged ‘ Alicia Blue Gallery ’

Twombly House: Ephemeral Museum

The Twombly House: 4449 SW Twombly, Portland, Oregon
Open Reception: Friday, October 15, 2010 / 4 – 9 p.m.
Open for viewing: October 16 – 28, 2010 — Hours: Tuesday – Sunday 4 – 8 p.m., Closed Monday
for more info please visit: aliciabluegallery.com and nwmodernshow.org

Twombly House: Ephemeral Museum

Alicia Blue Gallery and Designform Studio, in collaboration with Living Room Realtors, is pleased to announce a special exhibition of modern art and design. The exhibition presents a mid-century ranch house which has been appropriately renovated into a contemporary dwelling; this project demonstrates the idea that art and design can be accessible and coexist in a living situation.

For two weeks this conducive space will be transformed into an ephemeral museum. The curating of this home will be well executed, down to the finest detail. The exhibit entails a complete spectrum of the finest collections – fine art, product design, and home décor. Design curators Giovanni Castillo (Designform Studio) and Trisha Guido (Relish Design) along with fine arts curator Alicia Johnson (Alicia Blue Gallery) will join forces to orchestrate this uncommon exhibition.

Artists:
Angela Baker / Caryn Baumgartner / David Boekelheide / Ryan Bubnis / Kevork Cholakian
Meredith Dittmar / Carlos DonJuan / Katherine Dube / Colleen Flaherty / Karen Florek
Lisa Gronseth / Renee Hartig / Junko Iijima / Timothy Karpinski / Lisa Kowalski
Jennifer Lee / Christine Nguyen / Saule Piktys / Heidi Schwegler / Micki Skudlarsky
Curtis Speer / David Stein / Kevin Taylor / Lien Troung / Samantha Wall / Bryan Wolf / Wes Younie

Designers: ALTURA FURNITURE, AMANDA WALL-GRAF, BRIGHT DESIGNLAB AND HAMMER & HAND, CALLUM CLARK, CRAFTED SYSTEMS, ESQUE STUDIOS, GRAIN, JASON ANDREW DESIGNS, JEFFMADE, JEREMY ALDEN, THE JOINERY, JONATHAN LANGSTON, LAND • LINE DESIGN, LEAH NOBILETTE, LORI MASON, Made, MAGMAX DESIGN, MARK DIAMOND, MERKLED STUDIO, MOLLY PURNELL, MOUFELT, NAMUH, NICHOLAS MICHEELS, PABLO PARDO, SCOTT SCHROEDER, SPACE DESIGN, TERRY BOSTWICK, TLAGG, TUFENKIAN ARTISAN RUGS, WILL ULLMAN

Host: Jenelle Isaacson, Living Room Realtors — jenelle@livingroomrealtors.com
Living Room Realtors have the master copy when it comes to knowing Portland’s inner urban neighborhoods. Their superb eye for living quarters spans from vintage, historic, mid-century modern architecture to green building. Living Room Realtors are being branded the purveyors of modern art-space homes.

Design Curator: Giovanni Castillo, Designform Studio — giovanni@designformstudio.com Designform Studio is a design studio specializing in commercial and residential interior renovation and design, with modern design and methodology at the core of their design practice. Designform’s collaborative approach ensures that imagination, expertise, and reality come together to produce exceptional projects.

Design Curator: Trisha Guido, Relish Design — trisha@relishstyle.com
Relish is a lifestyle, a mentality, a philosophy. It is the idea that everyday objects should be beautiful, functional and affordable. It is the zone between individuality and mass production. A carefully curated collection of emerging designers from around the globe inspires, elevates and touches our senses.

Fine Arts Curator: Alicia Johnson, Alicia Blue Gallery — info@aliciabluegallery.com
Alicia Blue Gallery is an online contemporary art gallery. We represent a balanced integration of emerging and mid-career level artists offering them favorable circumstances for promotional and creative maturity. Our vocation is to bring into being the imagination and technicality of passion, educate the eager and celebrate the arts.

STILL

Micki Skudlarczyk
Jacomijn Schellevis
STILL
October 1 – October 15, 2010
Reception: Friday, October 1 // 6 – 9PM
Lone Fir Cemetery — SE Morrison Street, Portland, OR

Jacomijn Schellevis and Micki Skudlarczyk are fascinated by death. Their passion is not
painted with a macabre brush, but laid down by the beauty of burial, its quietude of
organic process and its significance in world culture. Jacomijn and Micki met in Mexico
as artists-in residence. After realizing they had a mutual attraction to the nature of death
and experiencing firsthand the beauty and all-embracing Dia De Los Muertos, they
should collaborate.

In 2009, a well-received series of installations called “Origin-Oorsprong” were placed in
the Netherlands-where Jacomijn calls home. “Origin-Oorsprong” was based on Pagan
burial rituals native to the culture in the Netherlands pre-Christianity. They are now
placing a second installation with the gracious cooperation of Lone Fir cemetery- aptly
named “Still”.

On October 1st, there will be a sculpture of fairy-tale proportions built of a crystallized
sugar solution on the cemetery grounds. “Still” invites the public to come celebrate the
beauty of life and its inevitable process; the edible sugary installation will be slowly
dismantled by people who want to take a piece of this art with them. Eat it, shrine it or do
with it as you please, the rest will be a natural, symbolic disintegration into the soil and
vegetation-the sweetness of life dissolving into the earth to shapeshift into evidence of
life repeating itself into a subtle eternal fractal of gentle beauty.

The human experience of this installation is a launching platform for Alicia Blue Gallery‘s
full transition to an alternative art space. “Still” will be the trailhead of a manifold series of non-traditional experiential shows with the freedom to display more complex
aesthetics and ideas that eliminate the necessity of a brick-and mortar space. Keep
tuned into ABG’s website for new shows and excellent visual blog updates on more
amazing artists, documentaries and exhibitions.

I Dream Animal — July 29 – August 21, 2010

Opening Reception: Saturday July 31st 5 – 8PM
Extended hours for last Thursday July 29th 4 – 9PM

Alicia Blue Gallery
1468 NE Alberta St. | Portland, OR 97211

Alicia Blue Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition, “I Dream Animal”, featuring Los Angeles artists: Christine Nguyen, Karen Florek and Caryn Baumgartner. These three artists’ works represent a deep reflection into the world of imagination and dream. Their work shares a common sensibility that feels akin to a floating dream state- familiar, as much as fleeting.

Caryn Baumgartner’s oil on canvases are richly painted with colors that, if imagined, were mined from terrestrial mineral and oxide veins- powdered and instinctively processed. Crowning the surface with heavy distress, these paintings become gentle phantoms. Her expertise as a painter is seen in her large works, where her simple approach to her canvas keeps an unspoiled feeling. In both “Stag” and “Fawn”, she abstracts the figure and leaves just an outline of the animal surrounded in rich color, a ghostly reminder of the perfection of nature.

Christine Nguyen’s experimental use of photography comes alive in her large-scale installations. One feels like they have passed into another world- deep in the nadir of ocean, discovering schools of undersea neons with a mineral-like frequency. Alternately traveling to outer space with crystalline frost growing outside your view and minimally scattered fragile hexagon colonies. The black backgrounds with nearly celestial light leaks are highlighted with brightly colored creatures and constellations stemming from her imagination. Her imagery draws on elegant science and imagination-provoking wonder.

Karen Florek’s series of lith prints are explorations of the internal world of the body. Her hand altered images made in the darkroom are mysterious. X-ray photon blacks and whites with glass like elements add to the scientific beauty of an almost unclassifiable, yet organic skeletal subject. The process of creating a lith print involves time and dedication; there is nothing instant about it. The visual outcome is unique with a grainy surface retaining dark shadows and soft delicate highlights. Different colors and hues can be achieved by chemical reaction as the developer begins to oxidize and age, which adds to the unpredictable effect.

Alicia Blue Gallery — Art by Kevin Taylor and Colleen Flaherty

Kevin Taylor and Colleen Flaherty
June 24 – July 25, 2010
Opening Reception June 24th 1 – 10PM

Alicia Blue Gallery is pleased to announce “Rites in Passage”, the gallery’s second exhibition and Portland debut of San Francisco based artists Kevin Taylor and Colleen Flaherty. These are exceptional talents, who have shown in New York, Berlin, Japan, L.A., bring to Portland new works on paper and canvas.

Kevin’s series of ‘Shaman’ portraits are intimate studies in muted Gouache on paper that emerge from the pulse of indigenous mysticism. Where modern machine world removes us from the spirit of nature, Kevin works reconnects us. Complexity, beauty, and his sense of divinity combine to create a seamless, piercing impression on the viewer. Kevin Taylor’s strength as a painter is best experienced in his larger oil on canvas and paper. In “Encomium” and “An Assembly Eternal” he skims a rich snapshot off the pools of his own imagination. His most recent work, which depicts animals enclosed in scaffolding, questions the impulse to rebuild perfection.

Colleen Flaherty’s works are comprised of delicate, complex surfaces, masterfully layered line, washes of color, and snake shedding veneer. Her intricate vocabulary is evocative of ancient rituals where the marking of skin was proof of one’s journey in life. A series of stretched paper on board and an installation of 40 small puzzled together boxes make up her works on exhibition.

Alicia Blue Gallery
1468 NE Alberta St. | Portland, OR 97211

Le Hong Thai and Nguyen Van Cuong at Alicia Blue Gallery in NE Portland

Le Hong Thai and Nguyen Van Cuong
Where are they now? — May 15 – June 19, 2010

Opening Reception Saturday May 15th 6 – 8PM

ALICIA BLUE GALLERY
1468 NE Alberta St., Portland, OR 97211
503-505-9060

“Where are they now?” opens this weekend at Alicia Blue Gallery in
Portland, Oregon. This exhibition of works on paper by Le Hong Thai and
Nguyen Van Cuong, is an intimate journey into the minds of two of Vietnam’s
best young contemporary artists. Both artists, living and working in Hanoi,
create works on paper that comment on the forces of modernization and
westernization that have been at work in Vietnam for the past 20 years.

Nguyen Van Cuong often paints with ink and watercolor on handmade mulberry
(“Do”) paper. The content of his work is audacious, like spoken word that tells it like
it is. Even today he is just one of a few Vietnamese artists whose work openly and
clearly cuts through the veneer of modern Vietnam to reveal its contradictions. His
work raises questions about Vietnamese society that allow us a deeper and more
complex perspective from which to inform ourselves about a country and people
whose history has long remained enigmatic.

Le Hong Thai’s work is also a commentary on the world we live in, but his visual
style is more likened to poetry. In the series of works on newsprint in “Where Are
They Now” Thai weaves a dream like narrative with recurring figures and imagery
that come in and out of focus and fade across the pages, encouraging the viewer
to literally ask “where are they now?”

Cuong and Thai have exhibited widely in Europe, Japan, SE Asia and Australia, as
well as in California. This is the first time their works are being exhibited in
Portland. Both artists are invited to come to Portland in 2011 as artists in
residence while they have a second exhibition at Alicia Blue Gallery.
Please join us on Saturday, May 15, 2010, from 6-8 PM for an opening
reception and meet curator Beth Gates and gallery owner Alicia Johnson.

Le Hong Thai, acrylic and ink on newsprint (detail), Nguyen Van Cuong, watercolor and ink on Mulberry paper (detail)