Dinara Mirtalipova: Folk Garden

Exhibition: Oct. 11 – Nov. 22
Opening Reception: October 11, Friday, 6 – 8pm
Artist Talk: November 2nd, Saturday, noon – 2pm

Dinara Mirtalipova, a self-taught artist raised in ethnically diverse Tashkent, Uzbekistan, renders vibrant flower-studded compositions and distinct folk patterns with a modern take on old-world charm. Inspired by nature walks, Soviet Uzbek folklore and culture, and trips to museums and libraries, her appreciation for all things happy, colorful and poetic translates into artwork that is woven top-to-bottom with floral motifs, generous use of line work, cozy creatures and stunning hand lettering.

Dinara now calls quiet, snowy Northern Ohio her home, where she works from her home studio using a wide range of materials and tools, including carving lino blocks and gouache. Whether it’s a bouquet of flowers, a mythical creature or a gypsy parade, Dinara’s eye for rich saturated color and detail informs the artwork, patterns and illustration she creates for books, fabric designs, greeting cards, apparel, home goods, and even wrapping paper. Her recent art book Imagine a Forest (Rock Point for Quarto Publishing) shares her knowledge, techniques and inspiration, with instructions for drawing and painting folk art. She has worked internationally with many great brands, publishers and ad agencies and her award-winning work has been covered by Huffington Post, Martha Stewart, Design*Sponge, The Food Network, Print and Pattern, Etsy, Uppercase and Culture Trip among others.

Pop-Up Exhibition: TaipeiXCLE / Jr-Yun Lee

November 15 – November 22
at CAN at the 78th St. Studious
Opening Reception: Friday, November 15 / 6pm – 8pm

Join us at the opening reception for this pop-up exhibition by our 2019 TaipeiXCle artist in residence Jr-Yun “Kila” Lee, featuring works produced during her 2 month residency at Zygote. The TaipeixCle program selects two artists annually to participate in a residency exchange between Zygote Press and the Bamboo Curtain Studio in Taipei, Taiwan. This pop-up exhibition will be located in the CAN Journal offices in 78th Street Studios, and will coincide with 3rd Fridays.

Jens Küster

Jens was born in Dresden and studies of metal sculptures and graphics/painting/ exam degree, Academy of Fine Art and Design Halle Burg Giebichenstein. Since 1994  he studies of North-Indian rhythmic, School of Music Berlin-Neuköln, extended study visit in North India.

Auditive rhythmic structures can be a very impressive interpretation of mental state of the people who create them. Due to the enormous sound variety of Northern Indian rhythm instruments, especially the Tabla, it is possible for the practicing musician to express himself largely. Owing to my own practice, I am getting an increasingly deeper insight into the basic principles of these expressional forms and I am trying to incorporate parts of that into my picture world. Interesting about that is for me the fact that auditive rhythm proceeding a certain time can be understood in one picture at the same time. And so there are and there could be various possibilities to perceive rhythm in the picture. With this perception I make structure pictures which I am currently calling “Inner rhythmic structures”.

Open House & Renters Summer Showcase

July 12 – July 26, 2019
Renters Summer Showcase and Open House
Reception: Friday, July 12
6pm – 8pm

Join us for a special exhibition opening featuring work by Zygote artists, in conjunction with our summer Open House. Guests will enjoy refreshments, music, demonstrations of the photogravure and non-toxic stone lithography processes, and view new work in our gallery by Zygote renters, long-term interns, and staff.

At the Open House we will be featuring all of the new items we received off our registry, as well as the green lithography process and the new photogravure room. Come see all the changes we have undergone in the past few months!

Also, meet Ivan Lecaros Correra former Creative Fusion artist and Director of Aguafuerte Taller print shop in Santiago, Chile. Ivan will be staying with us in ZPASS for two weeks on a self-styled residency. Music provided by DJ Swimr

This event is free and open to the public.

Exhibition: Stitched, Cut, and Bound

May 10 – June 14, 2019
Curator: Monika Meler
Monika Meler and Kerri Cushman
Opening Reception: Friday, May 10 / 6pm – 8pm
Artist Talk: Friday, May 10 / 6:30pm

Stitched, Cut, and Bound is an exhibition of the prints and artist books by Keri Cushman and Monika Meler. In her work, Cushman asks “So…what is a book? Is it defined by its form? Could a book, like a vessel, be a container of knowledge, or just a sequence of spaces? But most importantly, what can a book do?” Cushman often deconstructs the structure of the artist book, bridging boundaries between two dimensional printed media and sculpture.  Meler’s printed images and paper cuts pose similar media-specific questions associated with hand-printed images, as she examines the place of reproducible images in contemporary culture, invents hybrid printmaking processes, and is invested in exploring the vast non-traditional boundaries of the print media, often exploring forms that meander between two and three dimensional structures.

Conceptually, both artists focus on ideas of preservation.  In Cushman’s work, this idea is expressed through investigating the evolution of writing systems, asking whether the information age is making cursive handwriting obsolete, and trying to place the role that experience through sensory perception has played in human development.  Using the artist book and its historical ties to the evolution of language and writing, Cushman’s sculptural books and two-dimensional prints negotiate the space between tradition and the technological future, which often appears to be making these hand-made and interactive objects obsolete.

Ideas of preservation take a decidedly more personal role in Meler’s abstract prints and paper-cuts, all of which address the intangibility of memory.  An immigrant from Poland, Meler’s use of color and pattern and image attempt to re-construct the past, one that only exists in the mind.  When we remember something, it is actually less related to the actual thing/place/person and more related to our last memory of what is being remembered.  Using images inspired by architecture, her father’s elaborate gardens, and her mother’s rich Polish textiles, Meler’s work attempts to make sense of the chaos created by the act of remembering. Her hand-cut paper and alternative process prints are an attempt to piece together a large narrative of the past, that much like in Cushman’s work, often appears obsolete.

Exhibition: Capturing the Aura of the Already Said

March 8 – April 26, 2019
Curator: Margaret Hart
Featuring work by: Deborah Carruthers, Gabriel Deerman, Margaret Hart, and, Mark Roth

Opening Reception: Friday, March 8 / 6pm – 8pm
Artist Talk: Friday, March 8 / 6:30pm

Capturing the Aura of the Already Said 

This exhibition brings together the work of four artists all working with issues of replication and regeneration in a multifaceted approach to both process and content. By applying techniques of printmaking, collage, photomontage and painting each artist boldly engages the social issues of contemporary life through artworks of rich, multi-layered intention in their imagery and installation.

Carruthers, Deerman and Roth address in their work the entangled and sprawling problems which have been unleashed on the planet in the time of the Anthropocene, while the work of Hart speaks to the precariousness and complexities of identity in this posthuman era. These contemporary terms of Anthropocene and Posthumanism are entwined through social, theoretical and lived experiences. This group of artists bring these issues to the forefront in their work. In a strong visual and contextual conversation these artists discuss the sustainable and the fleeting through replication and regeneration informed by their individual research into contemporary philosophy, ecological theory, and identity politics.

Mark Roth’s paintings find inspiration in the cryptozoological artifact of blobsquatches – a blobsquatch being the indeterminate blob in a photograph that a keen-eyed observer ascertains is a visual capture of Sasquatch. Generally they take the form of forest views with a circle drawing one’s attention to the purported creature. Roth contends the resilience of Bigfoot speaks to the persistent yearning to see primeval nature staring back at us in a form analogous to our own. In a blobsquatch the circling line is the essential component for it represents the culmination of careful scrutiny and an urgency to share the benefits of passionate looking. In these works the artist has made it his quest to locate evidence of Sasquatch in the paintings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The encircling line repeats so that the composition assumes a target shape, utilizing the notion that the bullseye represents an apogee of yearning – in this case to strike a connection with primordial painters in the wilderness of art and its making.

Gabriel Deerman’s work utilizes a variety of media and technical artistic approaches as a means of engaging issues of the present such as globalization and climate triggered cultural and scientific re-assessments of human relationships to time and place. Gabriel’s art practice is at once an inquiry into the aesthetic experience of nature (complicated by the notion of Anthropocene) as well as a process of attunement- bringing him and viewers closer to bridging the human/nature divide through an identification and collapsing of distance. Through placing images and objects in relational situations Gabriel assembles, balances and counter balances poetic visual structures as an act of processing a precarious present. Finished works are the results of a making as thinking/feeling process and offer possibilities to viewers for finding resonance with the work and by extension engaging in an image/object mediated interaction with the artist. The works are at once offerings of the artist’s own reflections and prompts for reflection within the viewer.

Margaret Hart’s work explores the relationship between human and non-human agents, such as technology and place. The collage form is one of transformation and transition and suggests an unfixed state, or an incompleteness, still in the progress of becoming. These works exist in a posthuman time and articulate a philosophical framework of inclusivity and fluidity. By embracing the ideas of variety and change, becoming allows for a multiplicity of subjects in various stages of transformation and eliminates a hierarchical positioning of subjects.  This generative process is central to becoming but also to the practice of collage.

***

• Mark Roth image: Blobsquatch: The Three Ages of Humans by Dosso Dossi, oil and acrylic on canvas, 20″ x 20″

• Deborah Carruthers image: Athabasca Glacier No.1, 24″ x 36″, giclée on Epson enhanced matte paper

• Gabriel Deerman image: Winter

• Margaret Hart image: Untitled, 2018 mixed media collage 8 x 10 inches

re:surface

January  18 – February 15, 2019
Curator: Nicole Schneider
Featuring works by: Grace Summanen, Elizabeth Emery, and Nicole Schneider Opening Reception: Friday, January 18 / 6pm – 8pm
Artist Talk: Friday, January 18 / 6:30pmre:surface
The surface of an object is more than “a mere geometric solid,” but is “filled with, spread over by, or suffused with perceivable qualities such as color and warmth.”

 — Panayot Butchvarov

When one thinks about the concept of surface, one might think about something as being superficial, or limited to what is perceivable on the surface of an object.  But the word surface can be interpreted in a multitude of ways: To provide something with a surface.  To apply a surface to something.  To rise to the surface.  To come out of hiding.  For information or facts to become known.  To make information or facts known.  To appear or to be found.  The word surface also implies that there is something beneath or contained by the surface itself.  The three artists in this exhibition approach surface in varied and unique ways.

Grace Summanen, Elizabeth Emery, and Nicole Schneider are three Northeast Ohio based artists who approach abstraction in similar ways, and whose work is connected both formally and conceptually.  These artists rely heavily on intuition, chance, and improvisation as driving forces when determining form in the final works.  Each also approaches materials in a similar way through the use of found, discarded, and mass-produced objects in combination with traditional art materials. This juxtapositioning of materials is further enhanced by the interplay of differing colors, textures, and surface qualities. These pairings of materials draw attention to harmonious and alternately discordant formal and conceptual relationships.  The resulting works display a playful, experimental attitude towards art-making.

The works of Grace Summanen, which hover somewhere between paintings and sculptures, consist of bright,  multi-colored surfaces built up with many layers of paint.  While Summanen is interested in exploring the different surface qualities achieved through the use of varied paints and paint applications, she is also interested in the fabrics she manipulates to create the three-dimensional structure beneath the surface layer of paint.  While in traditional painting, the illusionistic rendering of fabric provides a common still-life subject, Summanen is painting the fabric itself.

Elizabeth Emery’s sculptures and collages combine disparate surface qualities in a way that is often jarring and disorienting.  The tactile qualities of the fabrics she selects to sew into molds for plaster casts are transferred to the surfaces of the plaster sculptures themselves.  Small plastic trinkets collected from everyday life are embedded in the solid forms, suspended between the surface and the interior.  This allows the imbued histories and narratives of these gathered objects to come to the surface.

Nicole Schneider’s monoprints are constructed with many layers of silkscreen and relief inks, creating a shallow physical surface where interior and exterior intertwine.  Regarding the art making process as a metaphor for mental and psychological processes, marks and forms become stand-ins for impulses, learned behaviors, and suppressed memories.  Chaotic gestural marks are concealed through the use of opaque inks and block out stencils, only to resurface in another area of the work.