Haute Romantics
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Within New York City's teeming art scene, a growing subsection of artists are creating work that maps the ideals of late 18th century Romanticism. Untamed landscape, aesthetic beauty, escapism, youth; these themes not only permeate the work brought together for Haute Romantics, but build upon a period, 300 years past, in which emotion was seen as an authentic source of aesthetic experience. While the geography and living conditions specific to New York, may, at least in part, inform this renewed sensitivity, the sensibility clearly extends beyond the cities borders. Splintered and passionate, Haute Romantics is a breathless snapshot of the moment.
Featuring work by Ryan McGinley, K8 Hardy, Katherine Bernhardt, Maximillian Schubert, Cian McConn and Kristen Jensen, Paul Gabrielli, Peter Sutherland, Asher Penn, Sara Vanderbeek, Naomi Fischer, Sebastian Mlynarski, and The Delusional Downtown Divas.
Receptions February 11 and 13, and March 13
Lecture with AFC Editor in Chief Paddy Johnson February 18, 7pm
Jeff Musser
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In the front gallery, we feature work by Verge Studio Artist Jeff Musser. The show includes works in oil, painting studies, and pencil and ink drawings.
Musser's current body of work intersects his masterful traditional oil painting of the human figure, with his intense study of modern day tattoo work and body art culture. Musser was born and raised in Sacramento, returning after receiving a BFA at the Chicago Art Institute. He joined the Verge Studio Project in May of 2009.
Sara Wanie
Gina Tuzzi
Andrew Patterson-Tutschka
S. Patricia Patterson
Robert Minervini
Patrick Marasso
Rhia Hurt
Cynthia Horn
Gale Hart
Jacob Fossum
David Fiveash
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Verge Gallery and Studio Project presents Magic Window, a group exhibition of Contemporary painting. Featuring 11 Sacramento and Bay Area based artists, Magic Window encompasses a wide breadth of work that exemplifies the diversity of painting today. From Patrick Marasso’s masterfully recreated oil paintings of candid photographs and Gale Hart’s politically based abstract figurative work, to Andrew Patterson-Tutschka’s formal exploration of urban landscapes and S. Patricia Patterson’s large scale watercolor glimpses of Americana, Magic Window promises something for everyone. Artists include David Fiveash, Jacob Fossum, Gale Hart, Cynthia Horn, Rhia Hurt, Patrick Marasso, Robert Minervini, S. Patricia Patterson, Andrew Patterson-Tutschka, Gina Tuzzi, and Sara Wanie.
The exhibition runs from November 12 through January16, with an opening night reception andHoliday Party on Thursday, November 12 from 6-10pm.
Two Second Saturday receptions will accompany the show on November 14 and December 12, also from 6-10pm.
Sierra Zumwalt
Sarah Bright
Renee Delores
Sunaura Taylor
Lindsey White
Amy Balkin
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Verge gallery is pleased to present Women on Nature curated by San Francisco artist Emily Prince. Women on Nature features an exciting combination of recent works by Amy Balkin, Sara Bright, Renee Delores, Sunaura Taylor, Lindsey White, and Sierra Zumwalt. Through a wide array of methods, from paper glaciers to a virtual proposal for making the atmosphere a protected park, these artists all investigate our human manipulation of the natural world, and they do so through a dynamic combination of the conceptual, the visceral, and the aesthetic. The exhibition will feature a mixed-media installation, painting, sculpture, photography, and a large-scale projected website, as well as a temporary library housing books that have inspired the specific pieces in the show. All the artists are currently living and working in the Bay Area.
Amy Balkin, who was a research resident at The SF Exploratorium in 2008 and is traveling this year to residencies in France and Canada, often addresses environmental and spatial politics through her art. Here she displays her online clean-air park Public Smog.
Sara Bright, a recent MFA graduate from UC Berkeley and an alumna of the Anderson Ranch Arts Center of Colorado, makes process-oriented psychological paintings of interior landscapes. Her recent works have become almost entirely abstract, yet still retain haunting allusions to wilderness, including geological forms.
Renee Delores, who has shown at DUMBO in New York and National Kinen Park in Tokyo, and has spent the past year learning the art of Zen gardening, subsuming her work in the pursuit of a communicative relationship between humans and nature, often to the point of complete erasure. She presents an installation here that includes documentation of a series of tattoos she created based on a note Charles Darwin kept above his desk.
Sunaura Taylor, who has shown at the Smithsonian and more recently at the CUE Foundation in New York, makes evocative paintings that explore portraiture and "moving" landscape and have in the past few years taken on the subject of animals in, or en route to, factory farms. Here she shows her large-scale epic oil painting "Chicken Truck."
Lindsey White, an Oklahoma native who received her MFA from CCA in San Francisco and recently completed a residency at the Kala Institute in Berkeley, California, uses photography, video, and sculpture to explore the simple magic of everyday life. Here her photographs play with the human intervention of light, creating surreal yet modest and miniature landscapes.
Sierra Zumwalt, whose work appeared at the deYoung Museum while she was still an undergraduate at SF State, uses ceramics, weaving, and sculpture to reference the passage of time and to draw upon patterns in common objects and nature. Here her paper sculptures become delicate glacial forms.
Together these unique works pose questions about how we relate to the environment, how we are nature, and even the potential for new directions.
Doug Biggert
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Verge Gallery and Studio Project presents, Hitchhikers and Other Work, showcasing forty years of photography by one of Sacramento's hidden gems, Doug Biggert. A Sacramento resident for over twenty years, Biggert has long been known to locals as the buyer for Tower Books and later, Newsbeat. Outside of Sacramento, Biggert is best known as the godfather of the 1990's zine movement for his work in getting 'zine aisles' into all Tower Books locations internationally.
Biggert's photography habit remained largely unknown until 2002 when two visiting friends, Xavier Carcelle and Chloe Colpe, discovered a box of stunning photographs in Biggert's living room. The box contained photographs of nearly every hitchhiker that Biggert had ever picked up. Impressed by the close to 400 images of wayward travelers, Colpe and Carcelle took the photos back to France and helped arrange a Paris exhibit of the work. In 2007, Hitch Hikers, a book of the photos, was published and multiple European shows and a documentary would follow, relaunching Biggert's career as a serial photographer.
Note the word relaunch as opposed to launch. Biggert's work had been recognized in the early 1970s with a solo show at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, showcasing a series of photographs he had taken at the Balboa Park sandal shop he worked at. Though the work was well received Biggert opted for freedom, choosing not to pursue a fulltime art career.
In July and August the Verge is proud to present both Biggert's Hitchhiker series as well as A Sandalshop Wall uniting two of the artist's most important bodies of work. Please, join us in celebrating one of Sacramento's hidden talents!
Daniel Johnston
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Born in Sacramento in 1961, Daniel Johnston is a musician and artist whose work has inspired everyone from Nirvana and Sonic Youth to Tom Waits. Johnston's musical career took off in the early eighties when his home-recorded, hand drawn cassette tapes began their dissemination throughout the Austin music community. Running parallel to his music career, Johnston has a thirty-year production of paintings, drawings, and illustrations that he has become equally known for. The Verge will be displaying a selection of the artist’s drawings and paintings as well as a collection of his early musical recordings. Most recently Johnston's drawings were featured in the2006 Whitney Biennial and the 2008 Liverpool Biennial. He was also the subject of the award-winning film “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” directed by Jeff Feuerzeig.
Personal Lives
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Verge Gallery and Studio Project presents Personal Lives, a photography exhibition by Greta Snider, Johunna Grayson, Cynthia Yardley, Jessamyn Lovell, Rebecca Crowther, and Juliana Paciulli. From Snider and Grayson's stereoscopic slide shows about place, to Paciulli's fictional narratives portraying adolescent themes, to Crowther's appropriated homecoming queen photos, Personal Lives explores notions of place, family, privacy, identity, gender, and innocence through photographic means. A native Sacramentan Crowther's homecoming queens reference ideas of class, race and sexuality as told through the exuberant faces of the young women depicted in the images. San Francisco artists Snider and Grayson use the medium of stereoscopic or 3D photography to portray individuals in their favorite places in San Francisco. A 3D performance by the two women on March 20th at 7pm will accompany the show. New York based, Northern California native Cynthia Yardley will show her mosaiced work portraying book shelves, medicine cabinets, and curio cases creating a sort of portrait in absentia. UCD Graduate Juliana Paciulli of Los Angeles, creates lush fabricated narratives depicting adolescent themes regarding anxiety, embarrassment, and self image. Finally bay area artist Jessamyn Lovell's compelling images documenting her family's existence in rural NY lend a sober, sometimes sad, sometimes humorous counterpoint to the show.
Stephen Kaltenbach
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A series of "bad ideas." That's how area artist Stephen Kaltenbach defines his coming exhibition at the newly opened Verge Gallery and Studio Project. Whether "bad" because of the devastating environmental repercussions implied in some of the works or "bad" as a result of the absurdity in execution some pieces suggest. Kaltenbach's first Sacramento exhibition in almost twenty years possesses all the tongue in cheek playfulness and ambiguity that the artist has become famous for over his forty year career. Nuclear Projects and Other Work, will combine recent works along side pieces that date back to the late sixties offering a retrospective of sorts for an artist whose career has seen a marked regional and international resurgence.
Beginning in 1968 with his anonymous works in Art Forum, Stephen Kaltenbach distinctly grounded himself amongst the conceptual elite of his time. Working in conjunction with artists like Bruce Nauman and Dennis Oppenheim, Kaltenbach's star shone brightly and his career was on a steady rise until 1970 when he decided to shirk the spotlight in favor of the seeming anonymity of the Sacramento region. Locally Kaltenbach is probably best known for Portrait of My Father a seminal work which took the artist 7 years to complete. The work is now in the permanent collection of the Crocker Art Museum.
The Verge selected Kaltenbach for its grand opening exhibition as a testament to the talent this region has to offer. Though locally the artist may be best known for Portrait of My Father, on a national and international level, he is considered one of the founding fathers of conceptual art.
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