Opening Today: "PROCESS" at the UNLV Barrick Museum

Mark Moore Fine Art
Jan 31, 2017 1:58AM

Mark Moore Fine Art is pleased to announce that ten MMFA artists will be featured in the exhibition titled PROCESS curated by Matthew Gardocki at the Barrick Museum at the University of Nevada Las Vegas which is currently on view through May 13, 2017. 

This exhibition includes works by artists: Julie Oppermann; Christopher Duncan; John Bauer; Lester Monzon; Kim Rugg; Kara Joslyn; Heidi Schwegler; Meghan Smythe; Christopher Russell, along with Ryan Wallace. Each of the artist’s process of creation is brought to the forefront in the exhibition. While some of the work seems very immediate visually the artists process is actually quite extensive in getting to the final image. Highlighted are the artist’s use of materials including the sun and time to create abstractions while others use computers and man made materials.

Rooted in Dada and performance theater, Process Art is a conceptual framework that allows the intangible act of creation to be made perceptible in the finished artwork. It played a key role in the careers of pioneering twentieth-century art world figures such as Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra. Following in their footsteps, the artists of “Process” have forged eloquent visual languages around the environmental effects of the sun, the retrieval of debris from a studio floor, and the intricate movements that a hand undergoes as it cuts and reassembles postage stamps. Visitors can expect to encounter a fresh and perhaps unfamiliar field of art-making in which energy is celebrated and the finished object is not always the principle focus. 

Curator Matthew Gardocki comments, “I have always been primarily interested in the exploration the artist undertakes, and these works are glimpses into the visual steps that carry each of them along their individual journeys.”   

The artists included in Process encompass a diverse miscellany of practice. Marrying digital manipulation with traditional stenciling, spraying, rolling, brushing, and printing, John Bauer revisits the intimacy of Abstract Expressionist mark-making from a mediated postmodern distance. Christopher Duncan works in a state of flux between maximal and minimal extremes, using repetition and accumulation as a basis for experiments in visual and sound based media. Kara Joslyn teases out the delicate quality of her forms using polymer auto paint applied with a laborious process of masking and airbrushing, calling up tensions between the hand-made and the industrial. The paintings of Lester Monzon gently lampoon the notion of a fixed context by collapsing architecture, space, and art history into a tête-à-tête between rigid grids and gestural marks. Julie Oppermann uses flickering, juxtaposed imagery to push the limits of visual perception, creating paintings that are physically difficult to perceive. By satirically dissecting and re-appropriating medium and meaning, Kim Rugg highlights the innately slanted nature of information distribution. Christopher Russell disturbs settled surfaces with scratches and haze, evincing the kinds of outlier memories that plague our psyche well after childhood. By mining the peripheries for discarded objects Heidi Schwegler creates bodies of work that inhabit an equilibrium between endurance and decay. Meghan Smythe weaves glass, ceramic, and concrete together in an orgiastic web of body parts and biological artifacts, monumentalizing our mortality in unanticipated ways. Ryan Wallace forges new abstractions from the detritus of previous works, generating a marriage between cognitive and intuitive ways of thinking. You can download a complete PDF list of works in this exhibition by clicking here.   

Julie Oppermann, TH1223, 2012 Acrylic On Canvas 72 x 60 in

Uniquely located inside one of the university’s three original buildings, the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art is entering its fiftieth year of service to the Las Vegas community. We regard this milestone as an unparalleled opportunity for growth and change.   The Barrick is not only an educational and exhibition space, it is also southern Nevada’s most important collecting institution. The Barrick maintains that it's goal is to develop a core collection of contemporary artists with ties to southern Nevada into an unprecedented asset to art scholars, historians, and Las Vegans from all walks of life who are searching for a deepened sense of pride in their city. 

Additional information, images, and reviews on all the artists in this exhibition and their work is available on the Mark Moore Fine Art website at the following link

Mark Moore Fine Art