Tell Me Why, Tell Me Why, Tell Me Why (Why Can’t We Live Together?)

February 15, 2017/in Previous Exhibitions /by lsg_admin.

Tell Me Why, Tell Me Why, Tell Me Why (Why Can’t We Live Together?)

Exhibition Dates
March 4 – April 29, 2017

Public Preview
Saturday, March 11th from 12:00 – 5:00pm

Evening Reception
Saturday, March 11th
7:00 – 9:00pm

What do we do when the news makes us cry?

Art remains a source of solace, explanation, and surprise. In Tell Me Why, a diverse range of contemporary artists consider our present moment of conflict, addressing narratives of difference and resentment as well as hope and beauty. The show’s title is a lyric from the 1972 Timmy Thomas recording “Why Can’t We Live Together?” which Lisa Sette calls “a beautiful lament of a song.” The song’s central question resonates throughout the show, with responses in the form of conceptually rigorous work from artists including: Enrique Chagoya, Sonya Clark, Jamal Cyrus, Binh Danh, Claudio Dicochea, Angela Ellsworth, Maximo Gonzalez, Siri Devi Khandavilli, Mark Klett, Carrie Marill, Luis Molina-Pantin, Ann Morton, Reynier Leyva Novo, Kambui Olujimi, and Charlotte Potter.

From the rollicking paintings of Claudio Dicochea, which reimagine the Colonial-era ethnographic paintings of Central and South America as modern-day pop culture operas, to Angela Ellsworth’s glistening, pearl-tipped explorations of Mormonism and feminine sexuality, the artists of Tell Me Why are connected by their fearless approach to experimentation, beauty, and political engagement, and their insistence on artwork as a means of cathartic reconciliation.

“Everyone is born somewhere. I’m not so interested in the idea of a shared origin, I’m interested in the idea of a shared destination.” -Claudio Dicochea

In a state of anxiety over our country’s state of affairs, painter and printmaker Enrique Chagoya took up transcendental meditation; his practice gave a new direction to his Illegal Alien’s Guide series: works that take their multivalent pictorial form from the pre-Columbian codex. The codices, remarks Chagoya, contain a series of “self-portraits as ethnic stereotypes from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America among others…addressing issues of xenophobia, gender, and racism, in a style that I call ‘reverse modernism.’” His work is a “conceptual fusion of opposite cultural realities that I have experienced in my lifetime.” This approach informs much of the work in Tell Me Why, as artists explore identities and cultures in conflict.

Artist Sonya Clark exhibits Unraveled Persistence, a Confederate flag meticulously deconstructed, yet even in its unraveled state projecting our nation’s most powerful symbol of divisiveness. And in a literal perspective-switch, Charlotte Potter’s Lenticular America consists of hand-engraved portraits on glass, spliced together and mounted using lenticular technology, so that, says Potter, “when viewing the work straight on the portraits… are only revealed by physically changing perspective.” Moving around the piece, the viewer glimpses the ghostly visage of Michael Brown, a young man killed in Ferguson, MO, as it shifts to a depiction of Darren Wilson, the officer who shot him.

In Kambui Olujimi’s newest series “Killing Time”, an installation of adorned handcuffs act as lyrical drawings to highlight the plight of mass systemic incarceration and the ties between those caught within a cycle they cannot escape.

Jamal Cyrus’ Kennedy King Kennedy triptych features excerpts from the Chicago Daily Defender newspaper’s reports on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy. Laser-cut into Egyptian papyrus, one of the earliest known writing materials, Cyrus lends historical weight to the seemingly disposable news cycle we experience on a daily basis.

Maximo Gonzalez’ “Arqueologia de la prensa / Archaeology of the press”, evokes the contemporary “multiplicity of repetition” idea on which today’s tendentious news culture is built. The repeating squares are created from the white borders of out of circulation currency and give the impression of a group of people, holding banners in demonstration and repetition. The empty banners can be filled with all the different fears, injustices, and claims that every group, minority or majority, in any country of the world are screaming out.

Bangalore-based artist Siri Devi Khandavilli mimics traditional Hindu temple figurines in her series of cast bronze sculptures. Khandavilli remarks, “These works are about religions and their relationship with violence and need for control and power, and human brutality disguised in the name of religious duties.” The series shows the incarnations of Vishnu, each brandishing a different weapon.

Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Novo uses reappropriation in his series “Margin Notes”. Each day he reads the highly censored Cuban “Granma” newspaper and clips figures or texts of interest and then alters the original meaning by rearranging the clippings to create unprecedented images of strong political commentary, interspersed with irony, poetry, and humor.

Mark Klett’s Fence separating the US/Mexico border south of the Gila Mountains, May 2015 captures the existential absurdity of political effort toward division: a lone steel wall crosses a gully while around it stretches the boundless, bare, and politically indifferent geography of the desert.

Meanwhile, across the border, Venezuelan artist Luis Molina-Pantin’s Untitled (Doorbells from Mexico) / Sin título (Timbres de México) series explores his droll observations of fear and personalized security varying from house to house.

A close examination of our human condition and current political situation may be dispiriting, but for some of the artists of Tell Me Why it serves as an opportunity for deeper aesthetic engagement. Carrie Marill says of her immaculately patterned acrylic on linen canvases, “My work is about symmetry and balance and pattern, and when I reflect on that familiar visual language in terms of questioning our society, I’m often lead back to meditation in order to calm my overthinking mind…”

Binh Danh, works with experimental photographic processes to capture “mortality, memory, history, landscape, justice, evidence, and spirituality.” Danh’s luminous daguerreotypes become mirror-like, an occasion for reflection and contemplation. “The daguerreotypes allow viewers to see themselves in the Buddha and for us to see ourselves awaken,” says Danh.

In an essential way, Tell Me Why is a united act, presenting contemporary work by artists from Bangalore to Mexico; the borderlands of the Southwest to California’s immigrant shores. While valuing conceptual exploration over a specific or exacting agenda, the artists of Tell Me Why converge in the shared practice of working to make sense of our common humanity.

“All we want is some peace in this world” -Timmy Thomas

Featured Work

Mindful Savage Guide to Reverse Anthropology (SOLD)

<h4>Sonya Clark – Touch</h4> glass beads, 108 x 1.5 x 1.5 inches

<h4>Sonya Clark – Touch (detail)</h4> glass beads, 108 x 1.5 x 1.5 inches

Siri Devi Khandavilli - Not in Anyone's Name: Figure 7

Siri Devi Khandavilli - Not in Anyone's Name: Figure 1

de Santanico Pandemonium y el Vaquero, la Vampira del Rio y la Pirateria (of Santanico Pandemonium and Cowboy, the River Vampire and Piracy)

Seer Bonnet XXIV (Sister Sarah) and Seer Bonnet XXV (Sister Maria)

Arqueologia de la Presna / Archaeology of the Press

Fence separating the US/Mexico border south of the Gila Mountains, May 2015

Untitled (Doorbells from Mexico) / Sin titulo (Timbres de Mexico)

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Luis Gonzalez Palma / Carrie Marill

January 4, 2017/in Previous Exhibitions /by Ashley Rice

Luis Gonzalez Palma / Carrie Marill

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Exhibition
January 10 – February 25, 2017

Opening reception
Saturday, January 14, 2017, from 7:00 – 9:00pm

Lisa Sette Gallery is pleased to present new works by contemporary Guatemalan artist Luis González Palma, whose altered photographs are entrancing forays into the diverse intellectual histories of Latin America. A widely recognized artist on the global stage, González Palma has exhibited with Lisa Sette Gallery for over 20 years, and his work exemplifies the timely international aesthetic the gallery is known for.

In the works comprising Luis González Palma’s Möbius series, frank and emotional photographic portraits of indigenous Guatemalans are presented at close range, each filling the frame with visages, and featuring a symbolic graphical overlay. Each anonymous face presented in this series is compelling in its own right—González Palma describes the portraits as “intimate, introspective, and conscious of their emptiness before the world” —and the same portraits are often repeated in the Möbius series, each altered by a different formulation of bisecting geometric lines and shapes. An encounter between two streams of 20th Century Latin American thought—the rationalism of the Concretist movement and the romance of Magical Realism—is the subject of this series, as González Palma proposes “to generate a symbolic reconciliation between these two artistic currents, activating tensions and creating relationships between two ways of representing reality from diametrically opposed perspectives.”

“The important thing is establishing the relationship between the emotional, figurative portraiture and the abstracted, geometric imagery. These two systems represent our craving to understand the mystery of life from different perspectives.”
– Luis González Palma

While González Palma’s intellectual vision speaks to a complex and evolving interplay of artistic works and historical circumstances in Latin America, the Möbius series stands alone as a profoundly moving collection of images that can be experienced without historical or geographical reference points. The pieces themselves, along with González Palma’s inquisitive willingness to alter the repeating portraits in order to bring forth a new imagery within each frame, are enough to keep the viewer within this body of work’s intimate, infinite loop.

Carrie Marill’s newest series, Unbalanced, was created in response to Luis Gonzalez Palma’s Möbius works. Marill chose crystal structures and geometric forms to explore the challenges of machine-made vs. hand-hewn. Marill, like Palma, attempts to bridge the gap between the natural and the technological, the emotional and the rational.

“In this series I am playing with these patterns and restricting my palette to let the hand and digital world compete in an aesthetic tease of balance and imbalance.”
– Carrie Marill

The opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 14, 2017 from 7:00 – 9:00pm

Selected Work

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Mayme Kratz / Marie Navarre / Hunt Rettig

November 5, 2016/in Previous Exhibitions /by lsg_admin.

Mayme Kratz / Marie Navarre / Hunt Rettig

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Mayme Kratz

Exhibition Dates
November 5, 2016 – January 7, 2017

Opening Reception with Mayme Kratz
Saturday, November 5th
7:00 – 9:00pm

For over thirty years Lisa Sette Gallery has served as a hub of the Phoenix contemporary art scene. Sun-sliced and spare, in a building designed by the Arizona modernist architect Al Beadle, the gallery boasts a roster of widely recognized international artists, including several Arizona artists whose works and lives represent the unique aesthetic circumstances of the urban desert. This November Lisa Sette Gallery will exhibit new works by Mayme Kratz and Marie Navarre, Arizona artists working in diverse media who address nature, longing and beauty, and who speak unflinchingly of the central role of mortality and loss in our collective experience.

Mayme Kratz embeds biological detritus in thick, luminous layers of polymer resin. Her initial process is that of a naturalist; rambling the landscapes of the Southwest, collecting specimens from the desert floor, tracking rates of decomposition and dehydration among the many collections in her Phoenix studio. Then, working with viscous and chemically caustic material, Kratz expertly embeds her samples in wall-hung works and sculptural forms, elevating the landscape’s diminutive biological structures to the function of spiritual reliquary.

“The foundation of my creative process never changes. My work celebrates the endless cycles of change and rebirth in nature. My walks in the wilderness reveal fragile ecosystems, strange beauty – insights in detritus. Most of the time I focus on beauty, sometimes on memory, and recently on longing – for that which has gone missing – or what I feel, but cannot see.”
-MAYME KRATZ

In recent works Kratz is concerned with the notion of “absences or disappearances” that may be sensed both materially, in our changing world ecosystem, and within our own transient human life cycles. Inspired by a quote from writer Tim Walsh, “Many things are known indirectly through what they leave behind, by their lingering effects on whatever remains in their absence,” Kratz’s attention has turned to the empty places in her works; how they may delineate forms in and of themselves, and tell stories of longing or memory.

Marie Navarre

Exhibition Dates
November 5, 2016 – January 7, 2017

Opening Reception with Marie Navarre
Saturday, November 5th
7:00 – 9:00pm

The photographic constructions of Marie Navarre also examine the paradox of absence and presence, loss and recovery, and the work of building a world inclusive of both experiences. Printed on handmade digital vellums and opaline photographic overlays, with occasional collage-like interventions, Navarre’s images often depict the vast expanses of sky and horizon framing a smattering of natural features, such as a conflagration of spare branches, or a terse flock of migrating birds. Her images convey the disorienting and dreamlike experience of gazing just above the earth’s horizon, catching mainly sky.

Speaking to her recent series, Navarre states, “This work is informed by loss and longing. These feelings began to be guided by a tenuous sense of wholeness.”

Navarre’s work to be debuted at Lisa Sette Gallery includes photographs shot in Japan, in an unusual flurry of image-making. Navarre reports that when she returned from the trip and began the task of sorting through her almost 500 images, she found sets that seemed to belong together, such as two nearly-book-matched angles of a plum tree, pictured in an atmospheric and spare work titled season of longing:

“I don’t remember taking pictures of both sides of the umeboshi tree or making the decision to photograph one side and then the other. There’s this sense of fracturing or shattering that has been with me for a couple of years…I was not thinking about that or the split pictures while I was photographing, but when I got back and looked at the images, they started to gravitate toward each other, and that had a resonance for me.”
-MARIE NAVARRE

In coupling these images, Navarre creates a tableau in which a vital sliver of information is absent; the images do not match up perfectly in a calm panorama, but rather join together two distinct angles of a similar vision, as if in acknowledgement that no single moment or expectation may encompass an entire truth. There is an enigmatic and profound power in addressing the fracture:

“What has emerged as I look at the work, and in the process of making it, is a larger sense of wholeness that is made more whole by loss.”
-MARIE NAVARRE

Hunt Rettig

Exhibition Dates
November 5, 2016 – January 7, 2017

Opening Reception:
Saturday, November 5th
7:00 – 9:00pm

Hunt Rettig’s three-dimensional, mixed media assemblages are startlingly unique. He uses materials such as polyester films and synthetic rubber to create works that feature looping, circular shapes and biomorphic forms, showcasing his sensibility for the organic, the cellular, and the sensual shapes of our natural world.

“Within my terrain I see cross sections of cross sections, impossible confluences, unnavigable borders, unrestricted constriction and breath-like expansion. Living forms appear invisibly visible, out of reach, out of context and infinitely reproducing. Combined, unnaturally natural landscapes manifest themselves. Settled or unsettled? The process is a slow unfurling, like a fern.”
-HUNT RETTIG

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Mark Klett: Border Markers

September 10, 2016/in Previous Exhibitions /by lsg_admin.

Mark Klett: Border Markers

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Exhibition Dates
September 10 – October 29, 2016

Opening Reception with Mark Klett
Saturday, September 17, 2016
7:00 – 9:00pm

The photographs of Mark Klett are consummate depictions of the untamable, immeasurable Western horizon as it intersects with our human experience of light, landscapes, and time. For nearly four decades Klett has documented the demanding environments and idiosyncrasies of life in the Southwest.

In his latest exhibition at Lisa Sette Gallery, Klett showcases his mastery of the medium in his new color “Saguaros” imagery, a series related to his “Desert Citizen” black and white photographs originally conceived as saguaro portraits.

Although the saguaro is seen as an emblem for the Southwest, it is truly a unique species confined to the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, Sonora, Mexico, and part of California. The hardy saguaro soaks up water and stores it to consume slowly, especially in times of drought – with a sense of survival and human-like ingenuity engrained within its spines.

Klett says, “The saguaro cactus is the icon of the Sonoran Desert…Individual cactus may grow as tall as nearly 40 feet and live over 200 years. For centuries desert people have considered saguaros to be the souls of lost ancestors. Their longevity marks time on a larger than human scale.”

Also featured in the exhibition will be a spectacular 30-foot wall expanse of hand-made “artifacts” by the artist. Each piece is a physical representation of a specific desert camping trip, used to predict light, mark time, and commemorate human experience:

“These sticks are used in the “Sunrise Stick Game.” I often play this game with traveling companions while on camping trips throughout the West. The game was invented as a way to settle campfire arguments about where the sun would rise in the morning (a subject of interest to landscape photographers). At night a circle about six feet in diameter is scraped into the ground and a stick is placed in the center. Players then put markers onto the circle in the exact spot they think the sun will cast the first shadow of the stick in the morning.”

Klett began making these sticks in the late 1990s and has made them on almost every trip to the present. The early sticks used in the game were discarded. But over time he began to carve them by the light of the campfire and adorn them with objects found during the day. Each stick represents a unique location and experience. Almost all the sticks make some kind of reference to the history of the land visited and the stories of the journey.

Klett has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Buhl Foundation, and the Japan/US Friendship Commission. His work has been exhibited and published in the United States and internationally for over thirty-five years, and his work is held in over eighty museum collections worldwide such as the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; the International Center of Photography, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

He is the author/co-author of fifteen books including Camino del Diablo (Radius Books 2016), Reconstructing the View: the Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe (University of California Press 2012), The Half Life of History, and Saguaros (Radius Press 2011 and 2007), After the Ruins (University of California Press 2006), Yosemite in Time (Trinity University Press, 2005), Third Views, Second Sights (Museum of New Mexico Press 2004), Revealing Territory (University of New Mexico Press, 1990), and Second View, the Rephotographic Survey Project (University of New Mexico Press, 1984). Klett lives in Tempe, Arizona where he is Regents’ Professor of Art at Arizona State University.

Featured Work

Ocotillo in Moonlight, along the Camino del Diablo

Saguaro: Two Arms Left Near Hat Mountain Camp

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Forbidden Futures

July 5, 2016/in Previous Exhibitions /by lsg_admin.

Forbidden Futures

Claudio Dicochea

Exhibition
July 5 – September 3, 2016

Opening reception
Saturday, July 9, 2016
7:00 – 9:00pm

Flourishing in the desert for over three decades, Lisa Sette Gallery represents the works of a diverse and expansive range of artists whose investigations in some way touch on the realities of the urban Sonoran desert. The experience of living at a cultural and geographical intersection is reflected in works from around the globe that are both conceptually fertile and thoughtfully crafted. This summer’s solo exhibit of the electrifying, philosophically-charged paintings of Claudio Dicochea: Forbidden Futures exemplifies the gallery’s intrepid commitment to challenging, compelling, and culturally pertinent artwork.

As a child in the border town of San Luis Río Colorado in Sonora, Mexico, Claudio Dicochea was fascinated by the comic books on sale at the local grocery, bound within a pulpy color cover and containing a “wonderful, crinkly sepia” collection of interior pages. A profound sensual appreciation for the imagery and philosophical appeal of popular culture is tangible in Dicochea’s work today–rollicking acrylic paintings that are influenced, and sometimes inspired, by science fiction, comic books, horror films, and popular music.

While Dicochea’s startling and irresistably compelling works draw viewers into a riot of recognizable images culled from the top-grossing, top-40 hits of the recent past, these paintings are compositionally structured upon the disturbing history of Colonial appropriation. At the outset of his career, Dicochea encountered 18th century ColonialCasta paintings—faux-scientific ethnographic charts illustrating the results of genetic intermingling between the native people of the Americas and European settlers—and the imagery encapsulated his sense of the profound aesthetic implications of intermixing human icons and cultural symbols. In many of Dicochea’s works, the painter joins together hybrid families of various “casts,” existing in a protean sea of class signifiers and pop imagery.

“Each painting takes an original casta as a template to be distorted, in which original characters are replaced by archetypes from popular media, comics, and world history…these works lift and sample from original paintings in order to understand the processes and effects of re-appropriation. In this manner, we can better understand how such re-appropriation functions as both language and method.” -Claudio Dicochea

In the process of creating these painterly visions of the contemporary cultural and ideological morass, Dicochea literally affixes printouts of imagery culled from the Internet and uses them as both philosophical and compositional guides in the process of transforming his canvases into teeming portraits of the fecund cultural collisions engendered by both our Enlightenment-era conceptions of reality, and our present moment of media saturation.

Of particular influence in Dicochea’s recent works is the realm of science fiction, as it intersects with the scientific-sounding fictions which have been used in the past to explain or justify social constructs.

“I’ve always found looking at culture through the lens of sci-fi really alluring. Social constructs having to do with inherited status are often loosely based on scientific research or so-called scientific logic, but at the same time they’re just utilizing whatever knowledge might have been arrived at in order to create or implicate a social fiction… the idea of “race” is kind of a blatant example of scientific fiction, or a narrative unfolded based on loose scientific facts, but really meant to legitimize exploitation. That’s the big connector, the big social fiction.” -Claudio Dicochea

Dicochea’s paintings resemble fever dreams of cultural and historical mashups, as played out in a collective arena that is both universal and specific to the many narratives of Latin America enacted upon a global stage. And while critical and philosophical underpinnings are integral to Dicochea’s work, these days the painter is concerned with the forward-thinking aspects of his project:

“Everyone is born somewhere. I’m not so interested in the idea of a shared origin, I’m interested in the idea of a shared destination. It’s a concern of mine to invert the cone of media influence and not so much point it toward the past but point it openly toward the unwritten future. When we’re talking about sci-fi, when we’re talking about the future, we’re talking about our destination.” -Claudio Dicochea

Featured Work

de Agent Smith y Noa Noa, el joven conductor sistemico (from Agent Smith and Noa Noa, the systemic youth conductor)

de Heart of Darkness (from Heart of Darkness)

De una Diosa y Marcos, el Doble Agente (of a Goddess and Marcos, the Double Agent)

Diceño de chichiMeco (Design of chichiMeco)

de Amor Prohibido y el Anarquista, el Emcee 2.0 (of Forbidden Love and Anarchist, the Emcee 2.0)(SOLD)

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Kim Cridler / Carrie Marill

April 23, 2016/in Previous Exhibitions /by lsg_admin.

Kim Cridler / Carrie Marill

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Exhibition
April 23 – June 25, 2016

Opening reception with the artists
Saturday, April 23rd, 2016, from 7:00 – 9:00pm

The works of Carrie Marill and Kim Cridler are both concerned with the tension between formal composition and emotional content. While their media and means of investigation are divergent, Marill and Cridler present artworks that are both beautiful objects and disciplined forays into the liminal area where ornament becomes function and emotion meets form.

The painter Carrie Marill fearlessly approaches the tension between ornament and object, intellectual content and aesthetic emotion. Marill’s work draws its power from an unexpected accretion of color and line within a contained canvas. An Arizona-based painter who exhibits nationally and has done much to shape the Phoenix art scene, Marill draws inspiration from a vast body of research–from folk quilts and Persian miniaturists to propaganda posters and industrial design. In each presentation, however, a disciplined philosophy of color and form pervades. Her works are recognizable for their rigorous, fine-lined beauty.

The foundation of my studio practice is an ever-evolving exploration of color and pattern. Studying weavings, quilting, and modern art, I am interested in pushing visual elements to their limits. The resulting paintings expose tensions between the living surface created by bold patterning and the constraints of the two-dimensional surface on which they exist. – Carrie Marill

Marill has referred to her painting as “Pop minimalism,” and her recent series, featuring geometrical exclamations and eery combinations of high pigment and stark pattern on linen canvas, seem to present something new to the realm of abstract painting. Like an optical/emotional illusion the repeating, limpid striations evoke a contemplative or hypnotic space, as though her work speaks to the constructive act of looking as much as it does the act of painting. Marill remarks: “As an artist this is my visual way of processing the information I encounter. I don’t know the answers until the very end. Or sometimes even the questions.“

While working in a vastly different milieu, sculptor Kim Cridler pursues a similar set of investigation into ornament and object, often making architecturally delineated vessel shapes studded with references to biological growth. In large-scale, immaculately fabricated works, the artist intertwines the deeply human pursuits of containment and ornament with the unpredictable patterns of plant life, affixing porcelain, beeswax, and other unexpected components to bronze and iron structures. The juxtaposition is compelling and curious, and Cridler’s work sometimes turns the tables, presenting a formal pattern of ornament or narrative bound to the unruly forms of felled trees or other organic treasures. The artist’s research is based both in an anthropological study of human design and ornament, and in the daily rambles around her home in rural Michigan.

“My work and research is rooted in the belief that the forms, processes, and materials that give flesh to objects of utility and ornament are rich with content–the tension between structure and decoration, the intellectual and the physical, the cognitive and emotive.” -Kim Cridler

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Maximo Gonzalez / Xawery Wolski

April 6, 2016/in Previous Exhibitions /by lsg_admin.

Maximo Gonzalez / Xawery Wolski

Exhibition
Up Through April 16, 2016

Spanning continents and generations, the works of Xawery Wolski and Maximo Gonzalez suggest an expansive new global order of art. Working in devalued currency (Gonzalez) and sculptural textiles (Wolski), both artists create philosophically provocative works from the raw materials of identity and memory, experimentation and tradition.

The works of Xawery Wolski arrive at Lisa Sette Gallery by way of Mexico City, where the sculptor lives and works after leaving communist Poland as a young art student. The son of a plant geneticist, Wolski blends a minimalist aesthetic with a sense of the complexity of design in the universe, presenting in archetypal and abstracted forms a refined, contemporary expression of the essential connectivity of nature.

Wolski’s cascading, organic installations seem to emanate a secret world from within a closed form. The sculptor’s Vestidos gather multitudes of clay or metal beads into enigmatic “vestments” which may recall ceremonial robes, crucifixes, or pinned specimens. In a striking piece that references traditions of both the Americas and Europe, a vestido composed of gold glazed terracotta beads presents a simple, shimmering image that bears the weight of history as elegantly as it proposes a modern grammar of object and form. Wolski’s work celebrates the inherent design of nature, while presenting subjects in their most essential form, with a sensual and reverent curiosity about the world.

Mexico City-based Maximo Gonzalez creates a sublime vernacular from civilization’s overlooked objects. The Argentinian-born artist has worked with detritus ranging from unspooled videotape to discarded aluminum flatware; he’s recognized internationally for scenes and installations composed of devalued currency. Gonzalez comments, “Reutilization as a form of vindication of disposed objects, by means of a transformation of these materials…is the uniting theme of my work.”

Gonzalez’s work with the devalued and obsolete currency of Mexico exemplifies the rigor of his conceptual and aesthetic investigation. His complex and delicate works executed in paper money are created using traditional making crafts such as punch-cutting, manual screen-printing, weaving, and a method similar to the Japanese cut-and-fold technique of kirigami. Through a series of labyrinths created with currency, Gonzalez delineates “the whimsical line of the division of territories, drawn conveniently for the one who traced it… a line that seeks to separate the inside and the outside, desire and wish, entering or leaving; a political labyrinth that is redrawn through centuries, always obeying the same line: the one that is traced by money.”

Featured Work

Yo Era Ese Arbol (I Was That Tree)(SOLD)

Aclarando Mis Ideas (Clearing Up My Mind) (detail) (SOLD)

Regalo para una esposa enojada / Present For an Angry Wife

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Rachel Bess / Charlotte Potter

January 9, 2016/in Previous Exhibitions /by lsg_admin.

Rachel Bess / Charlotte Potter

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Exhibition
January 9 – February 27, 2016

Opening reception with the artists
Saturday, January 9th, 2016, from 7:00 – 9:00pm

Lisa Sette Gallery will exhibit recent work by two young artists addressing issues of personal identity and digital personae. Arizona artist Rachel Bess makes modern-day vanitas and still-lifes in gemlike oil on panel, while Virginia-based Charlotte Potter accesses traditional forms of glassworking in creating distinctly contemporary sculptural and installation works. Both are rigorous practitioners who apply their formal skill to investigating concepts of selfhood and connection in a world of manufactured identities and enigmatic interactions.

The painter Rachel Bess melds traditional artmaking methods with 21st century concerns: Wielding light and shadow like an enchantment, Bess creates likenesses that are limpid and acute, in the formal vein of the old masters. Yet her models are contemporaries in leather corsets and black lipstick, posed in eerie vignettes, and her paintings are studded with present-day references. The result is startling—romantic and stylishly dark, somber and suggestive.

Bess remarks that her newest body of work came about in part through “thoughts about how different people and times are connected through inanimate objects.” To this end, her exhibition will comprise a series of portraits and still lifes linked by a common object.

“The thread that runs through all of the work is the idea of disparate people being, often unknowingly, connected through something that has no sentiment for the people it connects.”

A pioneer in performative and conceptual work in the medium of glass, Charlotte Potter uses the material as a metaphor for the fluidity, duality, and transparency of the self, and as representative of that which delineates the invisible borders between people. Some of the works in her Cameo series are made up of the profile pictures of would-be Facebook friends, blending the idea of a traditional cameo silhouette with the dissembling imagery presented on social media feeds.

In Message Received, Potter chronicles her relationship with a lover through a series of text messages: each message is displayed in a simple hinged locket, a message in relief and a reply in intaglio, as though if the words could just fit together somehow, they might create an impossible, perfect exchange between the two.

“All of my work is really about trying to articulate relationships in the modern age through virtual personas,” says Charlotte Potter. “What I’m interested in is how these… play out in our lives…and how to make them physical again.”

In Post Script, Susan Potter notes the strange quality of memorializing a loved one online, and the virtual afterlife that occurs on Facebook.

“In developing the cameo series mining Facebook data, I started to become acutely aware of friends who have passed on and the ways in which people attempt to reach out to them by posting on their wall. This work is the natural conclusion to this series exploring connectivity through social media and trying to make virtual relationships tangible. I am interested in the shadows that people leave behind and different mourning practices in modern society. Designed in the style of Victorian Mourning jewelry, each piece has been configured using Facebook data representing the frequency and volume of posts through glass beads and chains.”

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Bruce Munro

November 7, 2015/in Previous Exhibitions /by lsg_admin.

Bruce Munro

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Exhibition
November 7, 2015 – January 2, 2016

Public Opening Reception
Saturday, November 7, from 7:00-9:00pm

Working with fiber optics, LEDs, digital projection, and illuminating components both complex and simple, British artist Bruce Munro has created massive installation works for prominent international venues such as the Salisbury Cathedral, the de Rothschild Foundation, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Lisa Sette Gallery—a light-filled modernist space wrapped in a glowing fabric scrim, serves as an exhilarating format for the staging of several new works created by Munro specifically for the gallery’s unique interior.

Unafraid of beauty and an aesthete of illumination, Munro’s works address light as both a source of mystery and joy. Munro’s subjects are the spectrum of shared human experiences, and his inspirations are as diverse as his media—from the schoolboy humor referenced in his incandescent bed of nails, Restless Fakir, to the parable of Siddhartha quoted in Ferryman’s Crossing II, in which long and short flashes of light tell the story in Morse code, and the series of glowing dots and dashes brims over the surfaces of a contained interior space in riverine gesture.

Munro’s show will include Cloud, a work designed specifically for Lisa Sette Gallery that pays homage to the poem by William Wordsworth “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”

Munro remarks that in this work he seeks to “create an animated landscape of ten thousand abstracted Daffodil blooms, each with the equation for photosynthesis embedded through Morse code into its yin yang cellular structure. Ultimately my aim is to create a contemplative and dreamlike environment that reinforces that our experience is relative to the spaces we explore.”

While the works may be technically complex, often Munro’s networks of glowing patterns and spatial associations illuminate the simple, momentary magic that radiance effects: humans are biologically changed by exposure to light, and we are drawn to it as a source of pleasure.

“A constant theme of my work is to describe the fleeting but contradictory ‘forever and always’ truth of ephemeral experience. ” – Bruce Munro

Munro’s show at Lisa Sette Gallery will be his first gallery exhibition; in the past the artist’s work has been scaled to outdoor spaces or installed in vast interior structures. This fall Munro’s work is the subject of an unprecedented cultural collaboration in the Phoenix Valley entitled “Desert Radiance,” allowing the artist solo experimentation in scales and environments, from landmass to water, and the domestic to the panoramic. The “Desert Radiance” collaborators include some of the greater Phoenix area’s preeminent arts organizations, including a newly-commissioned indoor installation at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and site-specific outdoor installations at the Desert Botanical Garden and with Scottsdale Public Art on the Scottsdale Waterfront. This alliance of arts presenters is completed by Lisa Sette Gallery’s offering of diverse video installations—including two recently conceived pieces—and his newer gallery-scaled light-based artworks.

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Previous Exhibitions

Previous Exhibitions

David Kroll / Jessica Joslin

David Kroll / Jessica Joslin

Tell Me Why, Tell Me Why, Tell Me Why (Why Can’t We Live Together?)

Luis Gonzalez Palma / Carrie Marill

Mayme Kratz / Marie Navarre / Hunt Rettig

Mark Klett: Border Markers

Forbidden Futures

Kim Cridler / Carrie Marill

Maximo Gonzalez / Xawery Wolski

Rachel Bess / Charlotte Potter

Bruce Munro

David Kroll / Jessica Joslin

Selected Work

Exhibitions

Tell Me Why, Tell Me Why, Tell Me Why (Why Can’t We Live Together?)

Tell Me Why, Tell Me Why, Tell Me Why (Why Can’t We Live Together?)

Featured Work

Exhibitions

Luis Gonzalez Palma / Carrie Marill

Selected Work

Exhibitions

Mayme Kratz / Marie Navarre / Hunt Rettig

Mayme Kratz

Marie Navarre

Hunt Rettig

Featured Work

Exhibitions

Mark Klett: Border Markers

Featured Work

Exhibitions

Forbidden Futures

Featured Work

Exhibitions

Kim Cridler / Carrie Marill

Featured Work

Exhibitions

Maximo Gonzalez / Xawery Wolski

Featured Work

Exhibitions

Rachel Bess / Charlotte Potter

Featured Work

Exhibitions

Bruce Munro

Featured Work

Exhibitions

Lisa Sette Gallery

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