March Exhibitions: March 7 - March 30
Gallery Hours: Wed - Sat, 10 - 5 pm
James Stewart: Place Setting
Gross McCleaf is pleased to present Place Setting, a new series of oil paintings by gallery artist, James Stewart. The works in this exhibition highlight Stewart’s acute awareness of group dynamics, interpersonal relationships and the settings in which these affairs unfold. While a few of Stewart’s outdoor scenes reference broad themes from history and well known stories from antiquity, most of the paintings depict intimate, everyday interactions between family and friends, many around the table of a dinner party.
In Place Setting, one can almost hear the clinking of dinnerware over the din of cross-conversations. Though the details remain unclear, animated gesturing and facial expressions reveal the dynamics of the guests’ relationships and the energy of their earnest interactions. They lean into the flickering candlelight to share a drink, a card game, a bite of pie, some music or perhaps an idea.
Elizabeth Johnson: The Cost Of Sleep
Gross McCleaf is pleased to present Elizabeth Johnson’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, The Cost of Sleep. This collection showcases a series of oil paintings that blend vivid imagery and robust earth tones into dynamic, swirling compositions. Recognizable objects meld into painterly brushstrokes, only to reemerge as novel, unexpected pictorial elements.
Johnson’s painting process begins by collecting fragments of print media images and patterns. Responding intuitively to these visual sources, she categorizes them as either landscape or figurative imagery, manipulating chosen bits in Photoshop, warping and distorting them into curved shapes. The resulting digital image is printed out and reserved as a source of future inspiration.
In the studio, Johnson mixes a palette of mostly naturalistic colors that are reminiscent of weather, seasons, and a childhood spent on a farm. Mixing varieties of hue, value, and saturation that only oil paint can provide, she has learned that “all colors are useful, the ugliest especially." Pre-preparing images and media allows Johnson to devote her full attention to selecting subjects to paint. She works by trial and error, trying out possible digital images, frequently turning her canvases, and destroying most of what she produces. Permitting drifts of connection and metaphors that might bridge landscape and figural elements within her work, she deliberately avoids definitive narrative. She asserts, “If I feel a story is about to coalesce, I undo what I did and try something else."
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Simultaneous Choices, Conversation with Elizabeth Johnson
Sharon Garbe: Your whirlwind works have no beginning or end. You put images, which are stand-ins for experience, through a battery of digital ocean waves and vortexes to see how they fare. Then you reclaim the pixels and submit them to a different kind of fluidity. You play with space, time, memory, repetition and change, possibilities, and meaning. Could a subtitle for your show be “We Are an Unfinished Story”?
Elizabeth Johnson: Definitely. Humans have time and hope, and it's logical to pose indefinite, multiple endings. It's also logical to treat photographs as undulating surfaces or sculpture.
If I have anything to add to visual storytelling, it’s that I'm comfortable gathering random, transmuted subjects to make a dreamworld from simultaneous choices.