ARTISTS
Memoirs
Pablo鈥檚 Birthday is pleased to present 鈥渕emoirs鈥�, a group exhibition including works of Evan Halter, Rachel MacFarlane, and Mai Ta. While approaching painting with different techniques and processes, the work of these three artists connect through memory and the role it plays within their artistic realms. A detailed or zoomed-in representation of an imaginary reality manifests the use of a similar lens to translate their artistic perception of the concept of still-lives.
Working primarily from sourced images of pre-existing artworks, Evan Halter intuitively finds portions of these works which resonate with him, and by using abstract cropping and compositional methods, incorporates them into new paintings. He finds inspiration in still life because of its unique ability to draw the viewer鈥檚 attention towards details that, while small and overlooked, often carry great significance. In his book 鈥淟ooking at the Overlooked,鈥� Norman Bryson remarks that still life 鈥渞everses the scale of values in which what is unique and powerful in the world is the preordained object of the gaze, while that which lacks importance is overlooked.鈥� In his work, Halter hopes to bring the viewer鈥檚 attention to the small, intimate moments in a painting as a declaration that the quiet, overlooked moments, are just as important and powerful as the louder, larger ones taking place around us.
The work of Rachel MacFarlane laments the landscape and manufactures new places through the process of painting. Each painting is based on a memory of a particular place. The artist first builds maquettes that are made from paper in small shadow boxes. By using them as an observational foundation, MacFarlane fabricates new imaginative places, built from the residue of memory and the humble material of paper. The artist is interested in the tension between the invented qualities of the paintings versus the concrete qualities of the still life. This allows her to investigate the psychological nuances of illusionistic space, the loss of untouched ecologies, and the proliferation of synthetic spaces in new media. The models help to remove the empirical recording of a site that she hopes will prevent co-opting ownership of the places she examines. Somewhere between these influences, she found her position鈥揷reating place through methods of still life.
Mai Ta works primarily in gouache which allows her to work small in size with lightness and intricacies but also enables her to emphasize bold colors in the background. Her works have always been a special place to convey her most vulnerable emotions reinterpreted as memories. Her most recent series 鈥渕oonchaser鈥�, is a product of those feelings, creating intimate paintings which translate personal subject matters that Ta has never really tackled before: experiences of small, intimate moments that trigger a change, to live is to transform. Mai Ta dived into the black pool chasing the moon and in the end, she found it to be not so scary after all. 鈥渕oonchaser鈥� is a portrayal of that journey, and a reminder to Ta and those going through transformative periods, that the unknown is not as invincible as we think it is.
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Pablo鈥檚 Birthday is pleased to present 鈥渕emoirs鈥�, a group exhibition including works of Evan Halter, Rachel MacFarlane, and Mai Ta. While approaching painting with different techniques and processes, the work of these three artists connect through memory and the role it plays within their artistic realms. A detailed or zoomed-in representation of an imaginary reality manifests the use of a similar lens to translate their artistic perception of the concept of still-lives.
Working primarily from sourced images of pre-existing artworks, Evan Halter intuitively finds portions of these works which resonate with him, and by using abstract cropping and compositional methods, incorporates them into new paintings. He finds inspiration in still life because of its unique ability to draw the viewer鈥檚 attention towards details that, while small and overlooked, often carry great significance. In his book 鈥淟ooking at the Overlooked,鈥� Norman Bryson remarks that still life 鈥渞everses the scale of values in which what is unique and powerful in the world is the preordained object of the gaze, while that which lacks importance is overlooked.鈥� In his work, Halter hopes to bring the viewer鈥檚 attention to the small, intimate moments in a painting as a declaration that the quiet, overlooked moments, are just as important and powerful as the louder, larger ones taking place around us.
The work of Rachel MacFarlane laments the landscape and manufactures new places through the process of painting. Each painting is based on a memory of a particular place. The artist first builds maquettes that are made from paper in small shadow boxes. By using them as an observational foundation, MacFarlane fabricates new imaginative places, built from the residue of memory and the humble material of paper. The artist is interested in the tension between the invented qualities of the paintings versus the concrete qualities of the still life. This allows her to investigate the psychological nuances of illusionistic space, the loss of untouched ecologies, and the proliferation of synthetic spaces in new media. The models help to remove the empirical recording of a site that she hopes will prevent co-opting ownership of the places she examines. Somewhere between these influences, she found her position鈥揷reating place through methods of still life.
Mai Ta works primarily in gouache which allows her to work small in size with lightness and intricacies but also enables her to emphasize bold colors in the background. Her works have always been a special place to convey her most vulnerable emotions reinterpreted as memories. Her most recent series 鈥渕oonchaser鈥�, is a product of those feelings, creating intimate paintings which translate personal subject matters that Ta has never really tackled before: experiences of small, intimate moments that trigger a change, to live is to transform. Mai Ta dived into the black pool chasing the moon and in the end, she found it to be not so scary after all. 鈥渕oonchaser鈥� is a portrayal of that journey, and a reminder to Ta and those going through transformative periods, that the unknown is not as invincible as we think it is.
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