“Rock the Boat” Exhibition

490 Atlantic

poster for “Rock the Boat” Exhibition

This event has ended.

I once heard Agnes Martin say in a lecture that independence was the most important quality in an artist. I think these four artists possess that quality, and there is a uniqueness in their work. They are each very different, but share a love of process that guides them and is palpable. New forms develop, the work ends up in a different place than it started, and maybe even the artist got lost along the way. There are subtle overlaps of abstraction and figuration; a riff on potholders, toy ducks that function as beautiful shapes and colors, expressive sculpted animals exquisitely formed, and paint applied and manipulated so directly that it has a literalness. I am struck by the energy, freedom, and commitment in this work.

For years before they became the focus of my paintings I collected (and inherited) potholders. The images I’ve collaged onto canvas reflect my love of folk art as well as the art of India and Mexico. Their simple repetitive geometry reminds me of the meditative qualities of Tantric forms. Incorporating collage is a way of intermingling “real life” with abstraction. They refer to my interest in cultural diversity as well as my working class roots.

The larger paintings are expansive in size, full of many small jostling forms of disparate origins. The compositions are complex, dense, like my urban environment. I’d like to feel I can include “anything and everything” in the painting.

I’m haunted by childhood, dreams, and flights of fancy (or imagination). These paintings bring past, present and future together in one expansive, dream-like space. They’re Serious, yet full of joy. Using oil on canvas, simple and direct.

For me, the creative impulse cannot be stopped and never ends.

“Every experience is a moving force. Its value can be judged only on the ground of what it moves toward and into.” John Dewey

There are moments in life when an experience embodies the ethereal. Kayaking through mangroves revealed many elements I pursue in my painting: enveloping, intertwined roots which seemed neither to begin nor end; perceiving solid mass yet seeing beyond; pulsing forms mingling amongst intricacies.

My painting records a never-ending search to make sense of the world. A painting is inanimate, but I want it to live and breathe. Shifting atmospheres, obsessive mark-making, and passages seeped in color question the spontaneity of nature and conscious intent.
Elements assume color characteristics of the sky, a metaphor for consciousness. The idea is that consciousness pervades everything—it’s not just something out there somewhere else. The fabric which interweaves and entwines elements further suggests the inter-connection of all things and their emergence from or return to consciousness. Life begins as it stretches through openings in fabric or penetrates a horse drinking water infiltrated with air. Conversely, a burning house and elephant in gradated hues of sunset mark the end of a cycle, when life will begin again. The sleeping Buddha appears, and silvered flaming houses suggest the alchemical transformation of an awakening, where something no longer needed is destroyed as a rite of passage.

[Image: Kim Sobel “Beneath The Sky” (Detail) (2014) an installation spanning 8 feet, including elements in porcelain, resin, gemstones, white-gold, plastic, silk and water.]

Media

Schedule

from May 17, 2014 to June 14, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-05-17 from 18:00 to 20:00

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