James Harris Gallery | Formal Matters

Formal Matters

June 14, 2018—August 18, 2018

Group show including work by Richard Rezac, Gary Hill, Amir Zaki, and Cameron Martin.

Richard Rezac (b. 1952, Nebraska) creates refined, and elegant objects comprised of pure reductive forms; his inspiration drawn in part from emotive encounters with architectural and design details situates his work closely to the Post-minimalist artists of the 1980s. Human in scale and mounted on the wall, suspended from the ceiling, or placed on the floor, Rezac’s sculptures open viewers to close-looking and reflection upon the forms. Surfaces of painted and natural wood, aluminum and bronze contain subtleties that reveal the pristine sculptures as actually handmade. Richard Rezac has received prestigious awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome. He has exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art- Chicago, Yale University Art Gallery, Aspen Art Museum, Portland Art Museum and others. Public collections include the Art Institute of Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, and the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, among others. Rezac lives and works in Chicago, IL where he is Adjunct Professor of Sculpture, Drawing, and Graduate Advising at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

(copied from Rhona Hoffman)

Gary Hill is a pioneering artist of new media and video work. His video works incorporate commentaries on society and culture as well as bringing in poetic themes and ideas. Hill considers video as a medium to be the most receptive, flexible, and far-reaching mirror of consciousness. He creates psychological spaces within his artworks that allow viewers to see this mirror of their own consciousness.

Gary Hill lives and works in Seattle, WA. Exhibitions of his work have been presented at museums and institutions worldwide, including solo exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, among others. Commissioned projects include works for the Science Museum in London and the Seattle Central Public Library in Seattle, Washington, and an installation and performance work for the Coliseum and Temple of Venus and Rome in Italy. Hill has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, most notably the Leone d’Oro Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale (1995), a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (1998), the Kurt-Schwitters-Preis (2000), and honorary doctorates from The Academy of Fine Arts Poznan, Poland (2005) and Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, WA (2011).

A firm believer in the transformative power of the photographic image, Zaki images are rooted in the history of the medium and uses it to shed light on the means of representation. Over the last 16 years, Zaki has pushed the physicality of the photograph’s two dimensional construct, allowing it to exist on its own and also exploring its own object-ness. In order to capture and record the original site, Zaki’s representations depict the complexity of place in terms of interactive evolving experience, an ongoing ecological intervention. The artist responds to the shifting contemporary landscape where nothing is permanent, constructing his own visual language to illustrate an entire mythology of place.

Amir Zaki lives and works in Southern California. He received his MFA from UCLA in 1999 and has been exhibiting nationally and internationally since graduating. He is a full professor at the University of California at Riverside. His work is included in many museum collections including the Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

Cameron Martin is a contemporary painter whose work over the years has varied from landscape paintings to more recent abstract works focusing on color, shape, and space. Much of Martin’s work in the past has played with notions of site and non-site, with the image serving as a marker for unattainable direct experience. In this new work, it is as if Martin has revealed the originary site. No longer insisting on the muted tones characteristic of his earlier work, which elicited a contemplative silence, there is a sense of optimism in the commanding presence of these new pictures, a timeless physicality that has the potential to endure.

Cameron Martin was born in Seattle, Washington in 1970 and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He was educated at Brown University and the Whitney Independent Study Program. He is the recipient of a 2010 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a 2008 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. Solo exhibitions include ”Bracket”, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, NY (2011), “Currents 97”, St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, MO (2006), and “Focus 3”, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK (2006). Martin was included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial in 2004. His works are included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of Art, among others. In June of 2017, the Museum at SUNY Albany hosted a full-scale exhibition of his abstract work, accompanied by a catalogue including an essay by art historian and critic Suzanne Hudson.