Post by thinkspace on Sept 11, 2012 19:35:20 GMT -8
'Borrowed Memories’
Featuring new works from Stella Im Hultberg and Tran Nguyen
Plus in our project room:
Jeremy Hush
'At A Loss For Words'
In our office area:
New works from Michael Ramstead
Reception with the artists:
Sat., September 29th 6-9PM
Exhibitions on view: September 29th – October 20th
Thinkspace is pleased to present Borrowed Memories, an exhibition featuring new works by Tran Nguyen and Stella Im Hultberg. Concurrently on display in the Thinkspace project room are new works by Jeremy Hush along with a small showcase of new works from Michael Ramstead in our office area.
Stella Im Hultberg
Stella Im Hultberg is a Korean born, New York based artist. Her work is self-described as being driven by intuition and process. The impression of spontaneity and resolve when faced with her work speaks to this willingness to allow it to define its own end results. The artist produces across media, experimenting with materials and applications, and allows the work to evolve organically through its execution. At the heart of her practice is the exploration of identity, and an interest in shifting possibilities for the self and other. Her paintings of ethereal women subtly excavate the possibility of multiplicities in a single self. By combining detailed figurative rendering with surreal imagery, Im Hultberg probes the porous boundaries between self and other. The figures in her work appear in various guises, and she mobilizes them as vehicles for affect and suggestion. At times they are mirrored, multiplied, fractured; they emerge as haunting spectral entities without definitively binding selves. In this respect the figurative in her work seems a symbolic trope for the impermanence and inconstancy of our unremittingly changing lives and relationships. These beautifully executed images are populated with figures who seem unspecific and somehow symbolic, rather than literal individuals. The mutability and amorphousness in the figure, conveyed by the artist’s work, speaks somehow to the excesses of subjectivity.
The artist’s background in industrial product design helped to eventually guide her towards painting. A self taught painter, Im Hultberg’s aesthetic has evolved from an intuitively realized place and is informed by her material command of aesthetic and design. Her penchant for experimental investigations seems to permeate the materiality of her work. The artist’s command of several media is evident in her ability to take material risks, and to allow each material incarnation to have its own life. At times very graphic and guided by a clear acuity for design, the artist’s work clearly draws from several aesthetic influences. This is particularly visible in her use of abstract geometry and patterning, something Im Hultberg is able to seamlessly integrate compositionally with the figurative. These juxtapositions of the organic and the graphic create compelling tensions and associations. The “self” in her work is always positioned in relationship to an external reality or competing force or framework. Though the figures seem unspecific, they are intensely emotive nonetheless: they are vehicles for intensity. We are left with a very relatable impression of a fractured and unresolved contemporary existence, in which the self remains nebulous and shifting. Seductive and enticing, her work beckons us to lose ourselves in the world of the image.
Artist website: www.stellaimhultberg.com
Tran Nguyen
Tran Nguyen is a Vietnam born, Georgia based artist who mobilizes her illustrative imagery as a vehicle for latent psychic experience. As haunting dreamscapes, the narratives that emerge from Nguyen’s works are at once uncanny and eerily relatable. Suspended somewhere between waking consciousness and the subconscious, the imagery she unfolds feels as spontaneous and creative as the wanderings of free cognitive association. The stories that emerge from her pieces are charged with familiar psychological themes, everything from the phobic object, to the transformative metamorphosis, to the personal fantasy, but in the artist’s hands, far from being contrived, these stories feel organic, immediate, and beautifully eruptive, as though they have unfolded effortlessly. It is this illusion of effortlessness that makes the work feel truly liminal. Looking into these images we are elsewhere, we are other, we are held by an ambiguous suspension of reality. At times the artist’s strategies feel dark and haunted, but the beauty and delicacy with which they are rendered attenuates any feelings of anxiety or distress in their presence. This combination of charged content with delicate and luxurious execution make Nguyen’s vision truly magnetic.
Tran Nguyen’s pieces are deliberately and delicately rendered with subtle washes of diluted acrylic, and detailed applications of colored pencil. Her aesthetic and rendering convey affectively charged psychological landscapes, dreamy, sensual, surreal, and fantastic, like the hyper-real of the “elsewhere” in the truly immersive dream. The juxtapositions in Nguyen’s work are fascinating. Unlikely pairings, and unexpected contexts emerge with seductive clarity. We are left with the feeling that nothing is extraneous, and that everything is connected to some ultimate symbology within the work. In the tradition of truly consummate illustration, each symbol, each suggestion of imagery, each object, is part of the narrative “moment”, and everything has its place. The artist’s interest in imagery as a vehicle for healing, combined with her masterful rendering of textures, skin, shadows and folds, speaks to the work’s deeply psychological valence. From the recesses of the unresolved, emerge beautiful lush images; like exorcisms through imagery. While the work is evasive in its symbolism, something raw and relatable draws the viewer into the experience. The work luxuriates in the baroque excesses of the dream.
Artist website: www.mynameistran.com
Take a sneak peek at the works coming to life for ‘Borrowed Memories’ here:
thinkspacegallery.com/shows/2012-10/#photos
ON VIEW IN OUR PROJECT ROOM:
Jeremy Hush ‘At A Loss For Words’
Jeremy Hush’s work will be featured in the Thinkspace project gallery. This artist draws from a wealth of sources and influences. An avid world traveller, and a recognized initiate of the heavy metal and punk scenes, Hush has been creating work for zines and bands for years. Over the past few years he has been increasing his focus on his practice and exhibiting his art more extensively.
His work is haunting and beautiful, wild and chaotic, dark and saturated, but entirely unique. Clearly influenced to some extent by the linear styles of 19th century prints and drawings, his work combines this suggestion to a historical aesthetic precedent with a contemporary inflection in content. Hush’s pieces feel like Grimm fairy tales, in the most visceral way possible prior to any of the sanitizing forces of Disney. They convey the solemnity of the ancient, and the guttural impulses of the nightmare. They are raw, they are meticulous, they are clearly symbolic. The work feels allegorical in its dense allusion to nature and associative metaphor. The artist uses found materials to execute much of the work, everything from ball point pens, collected in the course of his itinerant travels, to coffee used for pigment, to inky fingerprints for crosshatching. The works sophistication belies the raw immediacy of their provenance.
Take a sneak peek inside Jeremy Hush’s studio here:
thinkspacegallery.com/shows/2012-10-project/#photos
Artist Website: hushillustration.blogspot.com
ON VIEW IN OUR OFFICE AREA:
New works from Michael Ramstead
Michael Ramstead is an oil painter from Long Beach, California. In 2010 he earned his BA in Art Studio from UC Davis.
Ramstead grew up constantly drawing his favorite cartoon and video game characters and knew from a young age that he wanted to make art for the rest of his life. Michael was introduced to oil paints in high school, and he’s been working with them ever since.
Ramstead’s subject matter is often times inspired by the paranormal and the supernatural, and his style is influenced by the work of the Old Masters and the contemporary paintings of Pop Surrealists and Low Brow artists.
Artist Website: michaelramstead.com
*All the artists will be in attendance for the opening reception
Featuring new works from Stella Im Hultberg and Tran Nguyen
Plus in our project room:
Jeremy Hush
'At A Loss For Words'
In our office area:
New works from Michael Ramstead
Reception with the artists:
Sat., September 29th 6-9PM
Exhibitions on view: September 29th – October 20th
Thinkspace is pleased to present Borrowed Memories, an exhibition featuring new works by Tran Nguyen and Stella Im Hultberg. Concurrently on display in the Thinkspace project room are new works by Jeremy Hush along with a small showcase of new works from Michael Ramstead in our office area.
Stella Im Hultberg
Stella Im Hultberg is a Korean born, New York based artist. Her work is self-described as being driven by intuition and process. The impression of spontaneity and resolve when faced with her work speaks to this willingness to allow it to define its own end results. The artist produces across media, experimenting with materials and applications, and allows the work to evolve organically through its execution. At the heart of her practice is the exploration of identity, and an interest in shifting possibilities for the self and other. Her paintings of ethereal women subtly excavate the possibility of multiplicities in a single self. By combining detailed figurative rendering with surreal imagery, Im Hultberg probes the porous boundaries between self and other. The figures in her work appear in various guises, and she mobilizes them as vehicles for affect and suggestion. At times they are mirrored, multiplied, fractured; they emerge as haunting spectral entities without definitively binding selves. In this respect the figurative in her work seems a symbolic trope for the impermanence and inconstancy of our unremittingly changing lives and relationships. These beautifully executed images are populated with figures who seem unspecific and somehow symbolic, rather than literal individuals. The mutability and amorphousness in the figure, conveyed by the artist’s work, speaks somehow to the excesses of subjectivity.
The artist’s background in industrial product design helped to eventually guide her towards painting. A self taught painter, Im Hultberg’s aesthetic has evolved from an intuitively realized place and is informed by her material command of aesthetic and design. Her penchant for experimental investigations seems to permeate the materiality of her work. The artist’s command of several media is evident in her ability to take material risks, and to allow each material incarnation to have its own life. At times very graphic and guided by a clear acuity for design, the artist’s work clearly draws from several aesthetic influences. This is particularly visible in her use of abstract geometry and patterning, something Im Hultberg is able to seamlessly integrate compositionally with the figurative. These juxtapositions of the organic and the graphic create compelling tensions and associations. The “self” in her work is always positioned in relationship to an external reality or competing force or framework. Though the figures seem unspecific, they are intensely emotive nonetheless: they are vehicles for intensity. We are left with a very relatable impression of a fractured and unresolved contemporary existence, in which the self remains nebulous and shifting. Seductive and enticing, her work beckons us to lose ourselves in the world of the image.
Artist website: www.stellaimhultberg.com
Tran Nguyen
Tran Nguyen is a Vietnam born, Georgia based artist who mobilizes her illustrative imagery as a vehicle for latent psychic experience. As haunting dreamscapes, the narratives that emerge from Nguyen’s works are at once uncanny and eerily relatable. Suspended somewhere between waking consciousness and the subconscious, the imagery she unfolds feels as spontaneous and creative as the wanderings of free cognitive association. The stories that emerge from her pieces are charged with familiar psychological themes, everything from the phobic object, to the transformative metamorphosis, to the personal fantasy, but in the artist’s hands, far from being contrived, these stories feel organic, immediate, and beautifully eruptive, as though they have unfolded effortlessly. It is this illusion of effortlessness that makes the work feel truly liminal. Looking into these images we are elsewhere, we are other, we are held by an ambiguous suspension of reality. At times the artist’s strategies feel dark and haunted, but the beauty and delicacy with which they are rendered attenuates any feelings of anxiety or distress in their presence. This combination of charged content with delicate and luxurious execution make Nguyen’s vision truly magnetic.
Tran Nguyen’s pieces are deliberately and delicately rendered with subtle washes of diluted acrylic, and detailed applications of colored pencil. Her aesthetic and rendering convey affectively charged psychological landscapes, dreamy, sensual, surreal, and fantastic, like the hyper-real of the “elsewhere” in the truly immersive dream. The juxtapositions in Nguyen’s work are fascinating. Unlikely pairings, and unexpected contexts emerge with seductive clarity. We are left with the feeling that nothing is extraneous, and that everything is connected to some ultimate symbology within the work. In the tradition of truly consummate illustration, each symbol, each suggestion of imagery, each object, is part of the narrative “moment”, and everything has its place. The artist’s interest in imagery as a vehicle for healing, combined with her masterful rendering of textures, skin, shadows and folds, speaks to the work’s deeply psychological valence. From the recesses of the unresolved, emerge beautiful lush images; like exorcisms through imagery. While the work is evasive in its symbolism, something raw and relatable draws the viewer into the experience. The work luxuriates in the baroque excesses of the dream.
Artist website: www.mynameistran.com
Take a sneak peek at the works coming to life for ‘Borrowed Memories’ here:
thinkspacegallery.com/shows/2012-10/#photos
ON VIEW IN OUR PROJECT ROOM:
Jeremy Hush ‘At A Loss For Words’
Jeremy Hush’s work will be featured in the Thinkspace project gallery. This artist draws from a wealth of sources and influences. An avid world traveller, and a recognized initiate of the heavy metal and punk scenes, Hush has been creating work for zines and bands for years. Over the past few years he has been increasing his focus on his practice and exhibiting his art more extensively.
His work is haunting and beautiful, wild and chaotic, dark and saturated, but entirely unique. Clearly influenced to some extent by the linear styles of 19th century prints and drawings, his work combines this suggestion to a historical aesthetic precedent with a contemporary inflection in content. Hush’s pieces feel like Grimm fairy tales, in the most visceral way possible prior to any of the sanitizing forces of Disney. They convey the solemnity of the ancient, and the guttural impulses of the nightmare. They are raw, they are meticulous, they are clearly symbolic. The work feels allegorical in its dense allusion to nature and associative metaphor. The artist uses found materials to execute much of the work, everything from ball point pens, collected in the course of his itinerant travels, to coffee used for pigment, to inky fingerprints for crosshatching. The works sophistication belies the raw immediacy of their provenance.
Take a sneak peek inside Jeremy Hush’s studio here:
thinkspacegallery.com/shows/2012-10-project/#photos
Artist Website: hushillustration.blogspot.com
ON VIEW IN OUR OFFICE AREA:
New works from Michael Ramstead
Michael Ramstead is an oil painter from Long Beach, California. In 2010 he earned his BA in Art Studio from UC Davis.
Ramstead grew up constantly drawing his favorite cartoon and video game characters and knew from a young age that he wanted to make art for the rest of his life. Michael was introduced to oil paints in high school, and he’s been working with them ever since.
Ramstead’s subject matter is often times inspired by the paranormal and the supernatural, and his style is influenced by the work of the Old Masters and the contemporary paintings of Pop Surrealists and Low Brow artists.
Artist Website: michaelramstead.com
*All the artists will be in attendance for the opening reception
