Evan Halter, Rachel MacFarlane and Mai Ta “memoirs”

Pablo's Birthday

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Pablo’s Birthday presents “memoirs”, a group exhibition including works of Evan Halter, Rachel MacFarlane, and Mai Ta. While approaching painting with different techniques and processes, the work of these three artists connect through memory and the role it plays within their artistic realms. A detailed or zoomed-in representation of an imaginary reality manifests the use of a similar lens to translate their artistic perception of the concept of still-lives.

Working primarily from sourced images of pre-existing artworks, Evan Halter (b. 1990 Cincinnati, Ohio) intuitively finds portions of these works which resonate with him, and by using abstract cropping and compositional methods, incorporates them into new paintings. He finds inspiration in still life because of its unique ability to draw the viewer’s attention towards details that, while small and overlooked, often carry great significance. In his book “Looking at the Overlooked,” Norman Bryson remarks that still life “reverses the scale of values in which what is unique and powerful in the world is the preordained object of the gaze, while that which lacks importance is overlooked.” In his work, Halter hopes to bring the viewer’s attention to the small, intimate moments in a painting as a declaration that the quiet, overlooked moments, are just as important and powerful as the louder, larger ones taking place around us.

The work of Rachel MacFarlane (b. 1986 Scarborough, Ontario) laments the landscape and manufactures new places through the process of painting. Each painting is based on a memory of a particular place. The artist first builds maquettes that are made from paper in small shadow boxes. By using them as an observational foundation, MacFarlane fabricates new imaginative places, built from the residue of memory and the humble material of paper. The artist is interested in the tension between the invented qualities of the paintings versus the concrete qualities of the still life. This allows her to investigate the psychological nuances of illusionistic space, the loss of untouched ecologies, and the proliferation of synthetic spaces in new media. The models help to remove the empirical recording of a site that she hopes will prevent co-opting ownership of the places she examines. Somewhere between these influences, she found her position–creating place through methods of still life.

Mai Ta (b. 1997 Saigon, Vietnam) works primarily in gouache which allows her to work small in size with lightness and intricacies but also enables her to emphasize bold colors in the background. Her works have always been a special place to convey her most vulnerable emotions reinterpreted as memories. Her most recent series “moonchaser”, is a product of those feelings, creating intimate paintings which translate personal subject matters that Ta has never really tackled before: experiences of small, intimate moments that trigger a change, to live is to transform. Mai Ta dived into the black pool chasing the moon and in the end, she found it to be not so scary after all. “moonchaser” is a portrayal of that journey, and a reminder to Ta and those going through transformative periods, that the unknown is not as invincible as we think it is.

Evan Halter (1990 Cincinnati, Ohio) works and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Halter got his BFA from The Art Academy of Cincinnati in 2013 and graduated with his MFA from Rutgers University in 2016. His work has been included in solo and group shows nationally and internationally, and most recently has taken part in the Here and Now curated by John Yau and Wes Sherman at The Center for Contemporary Art in New Jersey.

Rachel MacFarlane (1986, Scarborough, Ontario) works and lives in New York. She has an MFA from Rutgers University, a BFA, from OCAD University, and a Certificate of Advanced Visual Studies from OCAD Florence program. She has had solo exhibitions at Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Jarvis Hall Gallery, Mason Gross Gallery, NJ; the Howard Park Institute, Toronto; and Anna Leonowens Gallery, at NSCAD University in Halifax. She’s participated in group exhibitions in NYC, San Francisco, Florence, Quebec City, Halifax, Toronto, and Philadelphia. Most recently, MacFarlane was awarded a 2019 Elizabeth Greensheild’s Foundation Fellowship. The artist has her first solo institutional exhibition at MacLaren Art Centre scheduled for 2021.

Mai Ta (b.1997. Saigon, Vietnam) works and lives in Saigon. Ta graduated from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan in 2019 with her bachelor’s in fine art and illustration. Mai Ta has been part of group shows such as the Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 in Brooklyn, NY (2019); the Playground Art Fair at the Wythe Hotel in NY (2019); and the group exhibition Somebody, at the Hashimoto Contemporary (2020). Ta was recently awarded the 2020 Nancy Lee Rhodes Roberts Scholarship Award by the Society of Illustrators in New York, NY.