Tag: upcoming exhibition

Ken Flewellyn’s “Stay Gold” Up Next at Thinkspace Gallery

KEN FLEWELLYN
STAY GOLD
August 5 – August 26, 2017

Concurrently on view in the Thinkspace project room is Stay Gold, featuring new works by Los Angeles-based artist, and Thinkspace family veteran, Ken Flewellyn. A realist painter fascinated by the intersection of diverse cultures, personal histories, and Hip Hop, Flewellyn creates portraits of women that challenge our assumptions about identity and cultural homogeneity.

Inspired by his lifelong love of Hip Hop and his coming of age as a boy during its golden age in the 80s, Flewellyn’s work has always been about music and its impact on his personal vantage point and outlook on the world. As a cultural form, Hip Hop emerged from a localized cultural moment only to evolve into a variegated and international form that would systemically embrace the freedom of appropriation, and the complexity of multiple voices. This idea of cultural heterogeneity has influenced recurring themes in his imagery and has shaped his belief in the positive power of cultural mash-up.

Borrowing motifs and inspiration from Japanese culture and aesthetics, a visual influence in his home since childhood, Flewellyn often depicts women in traditional Japanese garb, silks, and kimonos. The subjects, however, remain anonymous, visible only by hands, body, and gestures, seldom, if ever, are faces or individuals revealed in their entirety. The subject’s identity, as a result, is relayed by the presence of revelatory objects, tattoos,  and accessories – external clues that point to something beyond the seen and allow for the aesthetic to prevail over individuation or the distraction of specificity. That being said, however, Flewellyn depicts real women based on actual people – friends, and strangers – anchoring his imagery in reality rather than unrealistic idealizations.

The juxtaposition of formal cultural garb and pop cultural accouterments keeps the work fascinating. These tightly cropped compositions are always informed by the presence of Hip Hop imagery, whether in the form of boom boxes, tapes, gold chains or typography. Playful and energized with tactility and detail, they’re both sensual and contemporary – solemn and light. Each painting in Stay Golden is adorned with the sumptuousness of gold and includes hidden Hip Hop references to its golden age throughout, all as an ode to the genre that has never lost its sheen.

 

The Space Monkey is Back! James Marshall aka Dalek is Coming this December

We’re beyond excited to announce Dalek is coming to Thinkspace Gallery this December. We will be hosting the return of the Space Monkey in celebration of his 20th anniversary. Thinkspace is honored to welcome James Marshall aka Dalek to our gallery for what promises to be a landmark exhibition. An exhibition that is not to be missed! This December we will be showcasing an array of newly created Space Monkey works alongside classics from his archives. PLUS never before shared early works on paper + new screen printed editions & more. Hot damn. I can’t express my excitement about this show properly in words. I’ve known this man for two decades and this is a dream come true. The Space Monkey is back!

This December we will be showcasing an array of newly created Space Monkey works alongside classics from his archives. PLUS never before shared early works on paper, new screen printed editions, and more. We can’t express our excitement about this show properly in words. In the words of our curator Andrew Hosner, “I’ve known this man for two decades and this is a dream come true. The Space Monkey is back!”

Coming In March – Atsuko Goto’s ‘The Silence of Idols’

Atsuko Goto
The Silence of Idols
March 4, 2017 – March 25, 2017

Concurrently on view in the Thinkspace project room are new works by emerging Japanese artist Atsuko Goto; The Silence of Idols is the artist’s first solo project with the gallery. A graduate of the Tokyo University of the Arts, Goto also studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris.

The artist creates beautifully melancholic images of delicate figures cloaked and merged with natural elements, everything from flowers and butterflies to insects, birds, and fish. Her muted palette is as ghostly as haze, achieved through the unique application of diluted pigments made from semi-precious lapis lazuli, ink, and gum arabic applied to cotton.

Inspired by Japanese Shinto and the belief that nature is animated by divinity and sacred spirits harbored in every living and inanimate thing, Goto creates imagery that conveys this feeling of profuse life force and intangible mystery, offset by a darker suggestion of mourning and lament. Quietly meditative, her works exude a dreamlike calm and resignation despite their abundance of detail and the density of her compositions. Silence and forlorn composure define this existence of the preternatural.

Fragile in their tempered darkness, the works are subtle and near translucent – like the unknown light and strange optics of an otherworldly plane where everything is unsubstantial. A feeling of entrapment and isolation persists, however, in the quietude. Like hauntings from the subconscious, the paintings feel like faded dreams, surreal distortions bordering on the ominous. Unsettling, the muted beauty of these diaphanous idols loom, uncannily caught in a thin veil between worlds.

Next Up at Thinkspace Gallery – Fuco Ueda’s “Odd-Eye”

Fuco Ueda

Fuco Ueda
Odd Eye

Opening Reception:
Sat., December 10th 6-9PM

On view December 10th – December 31st

Thinkspace is pleased to present its second solo exhibition of works by Japanese artist Fuco Ueda in Odd Eye. The Tokyo-based Ueda creates surreal paintings of enigmatic girls in strangely beautiful incandescent dreamscapes. With larger than life flowers and creatures ranging from moray eels to butterflies, her paintings are like apparitions pulled from the shadowy depths of the subconscious. Her mischievous adventurers are innocent and devious, at times playful and others sinister, suspended somewhere between the waking world and the beyond. An inscrutable universe of lush neon chrysanthemums and florid skins, Ueda’s world is a hallucinatory daydream.

Ueda’s works convey the lonely meditative feeling of dreams, a world set apart from the existence of others and self-sustained by isolated dread and reverie. At times a darkness pervades with recurring symbols like skeletal hands and the fiery orbs, or hitodama, of Japanese folklore, thought to be the souls of the dead. Another recurring symbol that figures prominently in her works is the chrysanthemum, also a symbol of loss, death, and vulnerability. These surreal apparitions reinforce a sense of displacement and transience. Her lithe figures, often charged with a cryptic eroticism, dissolve into the webs of these conjured worlds; like figments crossing over into ghostly recesses.

The tone of Ueda’s works tends to shift towards a lighter and more whimsical extreme as well. Her girls are often surrounded by small birds, butterflies, underwater creatures, beribboned pets, and dazzling flora, in dreamily abstracted landscapes that seem to glow and hum with weird life. The combination of these light and dark extremes is often unexpected, and psychologically evocative. Beautifully illustrated girls drip with honey and bare skinned knees, while snakes, fish, cobwebs, and bright fungi surround and shroud them. Contrasts abound in her choice of palettes as well, with the mixture of deeply pigmented hues, dark blacks, bright neons and iridescent pastel purples and blues.

Working primarily with acrylic paints and powdered mineral pigments on canvas, paper, and wood, Ueda dilutes her acrylics to create the consistency of watercolor. The unique quality of her surfaces is both chalky and luminous owing to this technique. Self-admittedly, Ueda is personally attached to her works, and her process is ultimately tantamount to a loss, preparing each for release into the world with the sprinkling of water as an acknowledgment of its completion and passing. We are left with the sense that Ueda’s world is in a constant state of transition and contraction, emerging and receding through the stitches of tenuously bound worlds.

CURRENT EXHIBITION

audrey-and-stella

Audrey Kawsaki’s “Interlude” & Stella Im Hultbergs “Hollow Resonance” are on view now through December 3rd.

 

 

Next Up at Thinkspace Gallery : Sandra Chevrier exhibition “The Cages; and the Reading Rooms of their Lives”

Sandra Chevrier

SANDRA CHEVRIER
The Cages; and the Reading Rooms of their Lives
October 15 – November 5, 2016

 Thinkspace is pleased to present new works by Sandra Chevrier in the gallery’s first solo exhibition for the Canadian artist, The Cages; and the Reading Rooms of their Lives. Based in Montréal, Chevrier creates mixed media works that combine sensuously rendered portraits of women with painted and collaged comic book overlays of superheroes. Manifold graphic segments and tear aways are used to obscure the facial features and bodies of her subjects partially. These iconographic images of conflict and struggle are posted over the contours of the flesh to create endlessly nuanced combinations, both heroic and dystopian in their allusions. Chevrier creates beautifully strange alloys of body and print to convey a personal terrain beset by social conflict.

In the artist’s Cages series, the vulnerable and human is offset by images of the superhero in varying situations of compromise, fragility, and struggle. The collision of identities both imperfect and paladin, suggests a conflicted and difficult vision of femininity; one colonized by competing ideals and expectations. Plastered both literally and figuratively with an illustrative veneer of superhuman archetypes and ideals, at times themselves in a state of injury or defect, Chevrier’s women become embattled vessels containing a host of incongruous roles. Her paintings are visually moody and dark, in spite of the primary colors and illustrative pictorials, and convey a depth and discomfort that resonates.

Sandra Chevrier

Chevrier creates what she refers to as “masks” and “cages” from these comic book excerpts, exploring both the external dictates and self-imposed restrictions to which the feminine is subject. Her confine metaphor of scripted identity problematizes the reductive social roles ascribed to women. Chevrier works with a combination of acrylic, watercolor, graphite, china ink, pastels, and collage to create complex sequences of imagery. Each portrait is developed intuitively and offers a simultaneity of scripts: heroism and weakness, beauty and imperfection, order and chaos, revelation and withholding. Chevrier is interested in the flaws in these narratives and seeks comic book references that capture moments of vulnerability and contention: failures in the hero and chinks in his otherwise unassailable armor.

A constant dance takes place in these works. Fiction bleeds in and out of reality, and several competing narratives obscure the identity of the subject. Ultimately, the imaginary and the real are equally unreliable in their deceptions and Chevrier’s portraits capture the multidimensional mire of this human fraudulence. The constant pressure to perform clearly defined roles is at odds with our true nature: we are all heroes and villains, successes and failures. Each face, each body and each self is a patchwork of conflicting stories.

Sandra Chevrier

Sandra Chevrier

Sandra Chevrier