IDENTITY Insight: Unfolding the Visual Narrative

IDENTITY Insight: Unfolding the Visual Narrative

Featuring David Bailin, Eric Beltz, Shay Bredimus, Wes Christensen(1949-2015), Josh Dorman, Tim Lowly, Michelle Muldrow, Len Paschoal and Fred Stonehouse.

Exhibition Dates: November 3 – December 23, 2016

Opening reception: First Thursday, November 3, 6 – 8 pm

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 5:30 pm, and by appointment

This show features the work of ten Koplin Del Rio artists and completes the series of three IDENTITY exhibitions introducing the gallery’s artists to a Seattle audience. Curator Eleana Del Rio grouped these artists together because they share a common interest in pictorial narrative. They all invite the viewer to interact with the imagery and engage with the work in a manner that allows two narratives—both the artist’s and the viewer’s—to play out over time.

“That silent afterimage that choreographs our dreams,
By attaching faces and bodies onto our thoughts,
Making them simple, concrete and timeless.”

• Wes Christensen, "Figurative Painting," Artweek, June 1996

Our curiosity is piqued and our attention captured by a good story however it is presented to us. When it comes in the form of a painting, drawing, or sculpture, we give ourselves over to a narrative that is visually and conceptually layered. Our senses are engaged by a fiction that unfolds visually in space and time.

“I try to make illustrations for stories not yet written.”
– Wes Christensen(1949-2015)

David Bailin
David Bailin received his MA from Hunter College in New York and his BFA at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has received fellowship awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the NEA / Mid-American Arts Alliance as well as the Arkansas Art Council. Bailin work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at Koplin Del Rio Gallery and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, both in 2014. His work has been acquired by a number of public institutions including the Arkansas Art Center Foundation Collection and Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington D.C. In 2016, he participated in the 58th Annual Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Art Center and received the Delta Award. Bailin has participated in the exhibition several times in the past and in 2014, he received the prestigious Grand Award. Bailin was selected by the Arkansas Times Weekly as one of “Arkansas’ Visionaries in 2014”. The 2017 International Drawing Annual 11 exhibition in print includes two drawings from Bailin’s “Erasing” series. David Bailin currently lives and works in Little Rock, Arkansas. Koplin Del Rio has exhibited Bailin’s work since 2002.

Eric Beltz
Eric Beltz (born 1975, Orange, CA) received his MFA from UC Santa Barbara where he currently teaches drawing in the Department of Art. Koplin Del Rio has represented Eric’s work since 2012. His work has been featured in Lowdown Magazine, Art in America, Juxtapoz, Flaunt Magazine, and others. Beltz’s work has been shown in galleries and museums across the United States and is held in the permanent collections of the Nerman Museum (KS), the Progressive Collection (OH), and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (CA). In 2015, Beltz was the Artist in Residence at the Art Design & Architecture Museum at the University of Santa Barbara. The residency included an exhibition titled “The Cave of Treasures” that received critical attention with coverage in the Santa Barbara Independent and the Santa Barbara Newspress. Eric Beltz: Chromatose at the Miossi Gallery, Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo is on view through October of this year.

Shay Bredimus
Shay Bredimus (b. Omaha, NE 1979) earned an MFA in 2008 from the Laguna College of Art and Design in Laguna, California and a BFA in painting from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada in 2004. He has studied under mentors F. Scott Hess, Stephen Douglas and Wes Christensen, among others. In recent years, Bredimus’ work was has been in solo exhibitions at Koplin Del Rio, San Luis Obispo Art Center, CA and Fresno City College, CA and numerous group shows in Hong Kong, Seattle, Las Vegas and Carlsbad, CA. Bredimus has earned critical praise with feature articles in the Huffington Post, Culture Magazine, Evolved, Prophets & Poets, Arts Journal and Inked. Bredimus was also voted as one of 10 local artists to watch in the OC Weekly’s Artopia 2014. A survivor of a traumatic brain injury that occurred at age ten Bredimus relates, “After the accident visual language became my first language and primary mode of expression, solidifying my life in the visual arts”. Bredimus’ work was first exhibited at KDR in 2008.

A figurative painter and renowned tattoo artist, Bredimus employs languid and gestural marks using tattoo ink on drafting film to portray spontaneous and personal moments of his models. His classical training in portraiture is evident, to which he has added aesthetic influences from Japanese tattoo and Ukiyo-e prints.

Wes Christensen (1949-2015)
Wes Christensen was born in Springford, IL and received a M.A. (Fine Arts) in 1979 at California State University at San Francisco and B.A. (Comparative Literature) in 1974 at California State University at Long Beach. Christensen has exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States, including the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in Ann Arbor, The Riverside Art Museum, The Pete and Susan Barrett Art Gallery at Santa Monica College, and the Gala Center in San Luis Obispo. He was awarded an NEA Visual Arts Fellowship and has also published articles in art, literary and archaeological journals. Christensen was a Graduate Advisor and Instructor at Laguna College of Art & Design for many years, until his death in 2015. Koplin Del Rio has represented Christensen’s work since 1993, most recently, a solo exhibition in 2014.

Tim Lowly
Chicago-based artist, curator, musician and teacher, Tim Lowly was born in Hendersonville, North Carolina in 1958. As the son of medical missionaries (his father was a hospital administrator), he spent most of his youth in South Korea. He attended Calvin College and received a BFA degree in 1981. In 1981 he married Sherrie Rubingh. Their daughter Temma was born in 1985. She is profoundly disabled (cerebral palsy with spastic quadriplegia) and has been a frequent subject of Lowly’s work. Since 1995 Tim has been affiliated with North Park University in Chicago as gallery director, professor, and artist-in-residence. Lowly’s work is currently on view in the La Mer | La Mère (The Mother | The Sea), a Lowly exhibition with 20 participants / collaborators at St. Mary’s University, Winona, MN through November 12, 2016.

Michelle Muldrow
After many years spent in the Bay Area and Ohio, Michelle Muldrow now resides in Portland, OR. Born in 1968, Michelle Muldrow was raised on Air Force bases throughout America. This nomadic experience laid the foundation for a great appreciation of the American experience and the vernacular that defines the American landscape. She earned a BFA from the University of Minnesota. After a ten year sojourn as a musician, Muldrow returned to painting in 2000 and began exhibiting nationally. In 2004 she completed a summer residency program at Cooper Union in New York City. Muldrow was awarded the Creative Workforce Fellowship Grant in 2009. She has shown widely in the United States with work in a number of prestigious private and public collections including the Microsoft Corporate Art Collection, California Cryobank Art Collection, Indy Mack Bank Corporate Art Collection and the Cleveland Clinic Art Collection. In 2015, Muldrow’s work was exhibited in the three-person show, Milieu at KDR and the gallery has exhibited her work since 2009.

Len Paschoal
Len Paschoal was born in Milan, Italy and has lived and worked throughout Europe, including Milan, Paris, Zurich, London and Iceland. A serious accident over ten years ago resulted in a hiatus from the studio as the recovery period was lengthy. He describes himself as a precisionist whose work includes drawings in powdered graphite and charcoal on paper and paintings in oil on canvas. His work is inspired by the artists Francis Bacon and Richard Long and recently by a visit in 2015 to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the 3-D photographs he saw from Mars. He uses his own photos as a visual resource. Paschoal’s work is included in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art as well as private collections worldwide. Koplin Del Rio first showed Paschoal’s work in 1996 (then Koplin Gallery) and most recently in 2012.

Fred Stonehouse
Born (1960) and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Fred Stonehouse earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin at Madison where he now teaches. His work has been shown in numerous galleries as well as several museum group exhibitions, including recent shows internationally in Germany and Italy, and nationally at The Laguna Art Museum, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, San Jose Museum of Art, The Art Center in Wisconsin, and the Cincinnati Art Center in Ohio. He currently resides just outside Milwaukee. Stonehouse is the recipient of many prestigious awards including The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, the Wisconsin Institute of Visual Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts, Midwest Fellowship Award. In 2015 Stonehouse had a solo exhibition at KDR and the gallery has exhibited his work since 1997.

For further information or photos, please contact Kimberly Clark at Kimberly@koplindelrio.com.