July 11 – August 31, 2013
San Francisco — Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to announce Journey Forth: contemporary landscape between technology and tradition, the first thematic group show at the gallery in several years. Artists in Journey Forth include Brice Bischoff, Val Britton, Castaneda/Reiman, Kevin Cooley, Gregory Euclide, Patrick Jacobs, Tania Kitchell, Mary Anne Kluth, Matthew Moore, and Clement Valla. The artists in this exhibition work with images of the world around us, both natural and human-made, constructing new visions rooted in traditional landscape genre painting. Traditional landscape pictures have served as representations and metaphors for generations. People have envisioned idealized situations, imaginary alternative worlds, and metaphysical possibilities, throughout art history.
As technology continues to develop, people have unprecedented access to a flood of images from remote corners of our planet. Contemporary artists working with vestiges of the landscape genre may live in the era of Google Earth, but nevertheless build on centuries of tradition. These works in a variety of media deconstruct traditional concepts of the sublime and what it means to bring the outdoors inside. As the broader culture continues to evaluate humanity’s role in our natural environment, this exhibition demonstrates echoes of the Romantic desire to connect to the world we live in.
Brice Bischoff’s photos of the Bronson Caves intervene in the famous setting of hundreds of Hollywood productions, producing new, mysterious illusions. Bischoff, born in New Orleans, holds a BFA from Louisiana State University, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work has been shown in exhibitions across the US and Canada, and in Germany and Japan. He has won prizes and fellowships from the Warsaw Festival of Fine Art Photography, and the Murphy & Cadogan/San Francisco Foundation. Bischoff’s work is included in the LACMA’s permanent collection, and will appear in the 2013 California Pacific Triennial at the Orange County Museum of Art.
Val Britton’s immersive, collaged works on paper draw on the language of maps, inspired by her father, a truck driver who drove eighteen-wheelers across the country. Born in New Jersey, Britton holds an MFA from California College of the Arts, and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited at the San Jose Museum of Art, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, as well as in numerous exhibitions in the USA, Japan, and India. She has received grants, awards, and residencies from such organizations as the San Francisco Arts Commission, Caldera, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Recology at SFO Museum, Kala Art Institute, Ucross Foundation, and Headlands Center for the Arts. Britton’s work is included in the Legion of Honor Achenbach’s Collection.
Charlie Castaneda and Brody Reiman, known as CASTANEDA/REIMAN, work with building and construction materials to make paintings, installations, sculptures, inventing of new landscapes influenced by Conceptualism and Minimalism. Both artists hold MFAs from UC Davis. Their work has been included in exhibitions in Israel, Korea, Italy, and across the US. They were included in Bay Area Now 2, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and are in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. They have received awards and residencies from the Fleishhacker Foundation, Artadia, Headlands Center for the Arts, Montavlo, Southern Exposure, American Photography Institute, Associazione Promozione Iniziative Socioculturli. Reiman teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and Castaneda previously taught at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Kevin Cooley’s videos and photographs document human interventions in the environment, exploring both beauty and tension. Cooley holds and MFA from The School of Visual Arts, and a BFA from Lewis and Clark College, and has completed public installations at Scope Miami and adjacent to the High Line Park, New York. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, and exhibited across the US, in London, Italy, and Paris. His work is included in the collections of AT+T, the Guggenheim Museum, and Harvard Business School. Cooley has completed residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Grand Canyon National Park, Caldera, Herhusid, Iceland, and Cite Internationale des Arts, amongst others. His work has been covered by Artforum, Art Ltd, The Sunday Times of London, Timeout New York, The Los Angeles Times, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Harper’s Magazine. His first solo museum exhibition entitled Elements will be on display this October at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego.
Gregory Euclide is a painter, illustrator, and installation artist known for dreamy images of the natural environment interrupted by pattern, texture, and dimensional materiality. He holds an MFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and a BFA from University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Euclide has contributed artwork for the band Bon Iver, and McSweeney’s publications, and has been widely covered by such publications as ARTnews, Art Ltd., Juxtapoz, and the New York Times. He has had solo exhibitions in LA, Seattle, and Denver, and been included in exhibitions at Museum of Art and Design, MASS MOCA, Minnesota Museum of American Art, and many others across the US. He has received grants and residencies from institutions such as Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council, Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Duluth Art Institute, The Hungarian Multicultural Center, and Northwest Art Center. Euclide’s work is included in the collections of The Progressive Corporation, Flint Institute of the Arts, Microsoft Corporation, United States Embassy in Sarajevo, and Nordstrom, amongst others.
Patrick Jacobs’ mixed media dioramas are uncanny portholes to a hyperreal, yet natural-seeming place. Jacobs holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA from University of West Florida. He has had solo shows in New York, London, Spain, and Miami, and been included in exhibitions in Ireland, France, Italy, Japan, and across the US. He has received grants and awards from the Vermont Studio Center, Giovani Collezionisti, New York Foundation for the Arts, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Jacobs has completed residencies in Germany, Vermont, and New York. His work is included in the collections of Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the West Collection, Pennsylvania, the Museum of Arts & Design, the University of Maryland, and Hallmark Cards, Inc., and has been featured in such publications as the Huffington Post, ARTnews, The New York Times, and Sculpture.
Tania Kitchell’s sculptures of plants, designed with software and fabricated with a 3D printer, represent species that are both alien and invasive in arctic regions due to human activity. Born, living, and working in Canada, she studied at Parson’s School of Design in Paris. Her work has been exhibited at the Anchorage Museum, Alaska, and Boston Centre for the Arts, as well as at numerous venues across North America. Kitchell’s work is included in public and private collections such as William and Ruth True Collection and The King County Public Art Collection and she has recently been awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Research and Production Grant.
Mary Anne Kluth’s collages re-imagine American Romantic masterworks entirely out of landscapes photographed at theme parks, contextualized by descriptions of the California landscape from the 1860s. Kluth holds an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute, and a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts. She has had solo exhibitions in San Francisco and at the Contemporary Art Center, Las Vegas, and been included in shows in Seattle, Portland, LA, Hong Kong, Osaka, and many venues in the Bay Area. She has completed a residency at Kala Art Institute, her work has been featured in ARTnews, Beautiful Decay, and Harper’s, amongst other publications, and she is a current contributor to Art Practical and Art Ltd. Her most recent curatorial project was a projected video exhibition set in a storybook theme park. Kluth’s works in this exhibition were made possible by a generous grant from LOOP Arts, Oakland.
Matthew Moore’s photos document earthworks done on family land, using crops to create patterns indicating where planned housing developments would eventually be built. The last of his family to farm American land, his artworks explore the relationship between commercial agriculture and suburbia, and interrogates the cultural transition into a post-agrarian economy. Moore’s artwork has been exhibited nationally, from the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, to Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts. Moore is a part of a traveling show about the contemporary American suburb for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which is being curated with the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Moore is published internationally. Metropolis Magazine, Dwell, and Architecture magazine included his work, as well as the publications Mark Magazine and Dazed and Confused. He is featured in Phoenix: 21st Century City, a book by Booth-Clibborn Editions.
Clement Valla collects Google Earth images that highlight incongruous unions of virtual 3D modeling and aerial photography, and explores the aesthetics of The Universal Texture, a Google patent that promises a god-like (or drone-like) uninterrupted navigation of our planet. Valla holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and a BA from Columbia University, and his work has been exhibited across the US, as well as in German, France, Belgium, and Spain. He has completed site-specific installations in Rhode Island and Bejing, and lectured and taught in Hong Kong, France, and the US.