Colette Calascione

Navegando por myspace me encuentro con esta maravilla... sin palabras... breathtaking*

Addressing the issue of gender identity and particularly that of "female identity," Calascione's imagination takes her into flights of fancy and fantasy in her paintings. She paints women in all guises, mostly unclothed, sitting on divans brocaded in satin, standing provocatively, looking at the viewer, reclining on a bed surrounded by the stuff of dream and fantasy, purring cats, fairy tale fish, toy soldiers.

Her "Self-Portrait with Internal Landscape" reveals the artist in a tiered yellow period dress with a roundel of a landscape brooch at her chest being opened by a man's hand, which enters the painting from the right side, a fragment of a person? To the left is a partial view of a table with vase and roses, above this hangs what appears to be a detail of an old photograph. Only a corner of this photo is revealed to the viewer, with curving legs of a table, and legs of a gentleman garbed in a tailcoat. Could this be a romantic connection? A black eye mask--inviting the viewer to peer into the artist's eyes and keeping the viewer at a distance--conceals the artist's pretty and gamine face.

Painted like old master paintings with a careful drawing, a monochromatic under-painting phase followed by many layers of oil, the artist beguiles us with her images and her imagination.

Colette Calascione was born in 1971. She received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, California. Her work has been shown at St. Mary's College, Moraga, California and the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as in many galleries, most notably in the San Francisco area.

Ion Birch

Generally modest in scale, Birch's carefully rendered graphite drawings have an effeminate old-world softness. Enraptured men and women housed in both Victorian and contemporary settings are depicted in perpetual stages of anticipation, expulsion and debauchery. The protagonist/antagonist in each piece is a thinly disguised version of the artist, appearing as the focus of the narrative, or featured in the periphery. Through this indirect form of self-portraiture, Birch offers us works that are journeys of self-discovery, taking particular interest in the awkwardly inaccurate ways one sees oneself.

Birch’s works delve into the Fin de Siècle notions of utopian optimism. By allowing genitalia and unbridled acts of hedonism to populate his pictures, the artist strives to demystify that which is typically puritan and suppressed. The Freudian subconscious inevitably peppers his scenes; his ethereal human tableaus manifest in fleeting moments within the mind and once put on paper act as a device to negotiate the artist’s innermost thoughts. By this method Birch deconstructs our preconceptions of sexuality framed as they are in high artistic form.

Loretta Lux

Loretta Lux (born 1969) was born in Dresden, East Germany and is a German fine art photographer known for her surreal portraits of young children. She currently lives and works in Monaco.
Lux graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts in Munich in the 1990s, and debuted at the Yossi Milo gallery, New York in 2004. The show put both Yossi Milo and Loretta Lux on the map, selling out and setting prices never before seen from a new gallery.
In 2005, Lux received the Infinity Award for Art from the International Center of Photography. Her work has since been exhibited extensively abroad, including solo exhibitions in 2006 at the Fotomuseum Den Haag, The Netherlands, and the Sixth Moscow Photobiennale. Her work is included in numerous collections in Europe and the United States, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Fotomuseum, den Haag; Reina Sofia, Madrid and Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland. She has had portfolios featured in numerous fine art magazines.
The artist executes her compositions using a combination of photography, painting and digital manipulation. Lux's work - at once alluring and disturbing - usually features young children and is influenced by a variety of sources. She originally trained as a painter at Munich Academy of Art, and is influenced by painters such as Diego Velázquez, Agnolo di Cosimo and Phillip Otto Runge. Lux also owes a debt to the famous Victorian photographic portraitists of childhood such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Lewis Carroll.

Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison

«Inherent in this civilization of consumption and technology is the waste and destruction of the vulnerable earth. The mythic world we create in our photographs mirrors our world, where nature is domesticated and controlled. The scenes we depict however, display futile attempts to save or rejuvenate nature. We portray these attempts within our work by inventing machines and contraptions from junk and obsolete equipment. These contraptions are intended to help the character we portray to jump-start a dying planet. We patch holes in the sky, create rain machines, chase storms to create electricity, communicate with the earth to learn its needs. Within these scenes, we create less refined, less scientific, more ritualistic and poetic possibilities to work with nature rather than destroy it.» ~ Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison.

sin palabras me quedo...

:: Scartissue Magazine event on friday 07/sept ::

Estáis todos invitados!

See u there*

Mark Ryden

Máximo exponente del LowBrow Art (arte sin pretensiones intelectuales) y del Subrrealismo Pop...
“la vida es una gran ilusión. Somos criaturas de energía pura y la carne es lo que nos mantiene enteros”