Stephanie Buer “Uncommon Silence” Coming January 2017

Stephanie Buer

Uncommon Silence

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 7 from 6-9PM
On View: January 7 – January 28, 2017

Thinkspace is pleased to present new works by Portland-based artist Stephanie Buer in Uncommon Silence, the artist’s fifth show with the gallery. Buer’s incredibly realistic paintings and charcoal drawings capture the vacant and desolate sprawl of abandoned urban spaces. An avid urban explorer, she seeks the quietude and calm of inactive buildings and areas, those marginalized and in disrepair. Capturing the life in absentia of these architectures and environments as they are overcome by vandalism, nature, and time, Buer finds beauty in the remnants that are left behind.

Buer went to art school in Detroit, Michigan at the College for Creative Studies, and spent the following decade in the area, capturing the infamous urban erosion left by the collapse of the American auto industry. In Detroit, a unique city with a host of abandoned industrial vestiges, Buer sated her need for contemplative calm and escapism through urban exploration. Interested in the layers of history that accrete in emptiness, and the stark contrast of desolation in the midst of excessively populated urban areas, Buer’s work began to question our relationship to excessive consumerism and unsustainable consumption through depictions of dissipated spaces. She likens the feeling of isolated discovery when traipsing through condemned buildings and architectural ruins, to her remote wanderings through rural Michigan where she grew up. In search of a poetic calm and beauty in the midst of what most would consider deterioration, she continues to uncover the oft-neglected sublime of the condemned and castaway.

Moving to the Pacific Northwest, where she continues to work, Buer has since begun to capture new cities and spaces through her photorealistic oil paintings and heavily contrasting, dramatic charcoal drawings. Her preference for traditional art historical media is a conscious one, fascinated by how the same media used for centuries can capture a contemporary moment without loss or inadequacy. In Uncommon Silence, Buer has taken on the city of Los Angeles as her subject for the first time, the result of a week spent exploring its recesses and urban derelicts; the works capture the light and atmospheric nature of LA in stark contrast to those of Detroit. An homage to a city that has played an integral role in the development of her career, the exhibition captures the specificity of LA as a place of great cultural and environmental contrasts, architectural diversity, fullness, and scarcity. Known for its murals, contemporary art scene, graffiti, and urban interventions, LA provided Buer with no shortage of color or drama in the landscape.

Her works begin with the journey into the city, where she documents her explorations photographically. Buer then creates compositions from her source material and executes the work with a staggering level of technical precision and detail. Always devoid of people, Buer’s works capture the traces of their intervention and the marks of their passing, whether through the shadow of the hollow structure itself or the evidentiary residues of physical interactions with the space. A recurring element in her work has always been graffiti, a primary way in which forgotten urban spaces are marked and reclaimed. The sense of collapsing temporality is salient, as old and new coexist on top of one another in these peripheries.

So Youn Lee “Limpid” Coming January 2017

So Youn Lee

Limpid

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 7 from 6-9PM
January 7 – January 28, 2017

Concurrently on view in the Thinkspace project room is Limpid, featuring new works by San Francisco-based artist So Youn Lee. Her works depict a pastel-colored world of innocence and whimsy and follow the surreal adventures of a serial character she’s named Mango and her entourage of fanciful, candy-tinted friends. Inspired by 90’s illustration and short animation films, Lee creates a crystalline universe of translucent textures and glassy surfaces. Her densely textured and stylized works are executed in a harmonious blend of oil and acrylics, varying from canvas to panels.

In this new body of work, Lee chases the visualization of nostalgia, creating pieces that invoke a sensory-based recall of childhood and its immersive experiential innocence. Known for her representations of an ambiguous, positivist, and captivating inner world, Lee creates delicately outlined figures pulled from effervescent fantasy. Light and playful, her world is a genderless, intergalactic, pristine, and suspended in a patterned space of bubbles, soft gelatin- like contours, and brilliant sparkling light.

Please join us on Saturday, January 7th to welcome in the new year and celebrate the opening of two new incredible bodies of work.