SEPTEMBER 6 – OCTOBER 26, 2013
JANE BOOTH: Color and Light
JULIA FERNANDEZ POL: Sky Atlas
CARRIE SEID: Glow
JANE BOOTH: COLOR AND LIGHT
Portrait Series: Strumming
acrylic on canvas
70″x 56″
Jane Booth chooses to live and paint away from the city atop a ridge of land that overlooks a large open valley where storms can be seen forming miles away and stars are clearly visible at night. Looking outward nourishes and sustains Booth’s inner spirit and, in turn, inspires and energizes her paintings.
Booth’s paintings begin as physical endeavor. Huge swaths of raw canvas are rolled out on the floor or outside on the ground and saturated with poured color until canvas and paint are bonded as one. The resulting paintings seem a part of nature, becoming atmosphere, environment and stage holding memories of land and light, insight and mystery, longing and finding. Sensitive, subtle and honest, Jane Booth’s paintings reveal wide-open spaces of strength, openness and vulnerability. Ultimately, they disclose the artist’s trust in the continuity and richness of life, within and without, and express a poetic vision of creativity, intellect and passion.
In 2012, the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, St. Joseph, MO, celebrated Booth’s work with a solo exhibition, Jane Booth Paintings: Life Moving Through. Her works can be found in numerous private and corporate collections, including: Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Emprise Bank, Cisco Systems, H&R Block World Headquarters, Hilton Hotels, Kansas University Heart Hospital, as well as featured in Kansas then Governor Sebelius’ offices and chambers. Booth has a B.F.A. from Kansas State University, Manhattan.
JULIA FERNANDEZ-POL: Sky Atlas
White Hybrid
2013
oil on canvas
72″x 60″
In her second solo exhibition at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, painter Julia Fernandez-Pol continues her fascination with the “incredible wonders of nature” in a series of paintings and works on paper that explore and hold galaxies of energy and fantasy.
Fernandez-Pol says of this series, “Topographical mapping, from a cellular level to the deepest ocean floor to the galaxy of stars and constellations, has been a central system of exploration for “Sky Atlas”. The exploration of these far away worlds can become a fantasy, where anything can exist. The beauty and catastrophe that can coexist is in a sense a metaphor for the human condition.”
By combining imagination, exploration and understanding of the dynamic processes of nature and physics, Fernandez-Pol has created paintings that capture the ebb and flow of kinetic energy and gravitational pull. It is as if Fernandez-Pol extracts a slice of nature, its DNA, and reformulates and mutates it into her new imagined universe where anything is possible.
Julia Fernandez-Pol holds a B.F.A. Washington University in St. Louis, MO and a M.F.A. from Boston University, MA. Originally, from St. Louis, MO, Julia Fernandez-Pol resides in Los Angeles. Her work is in the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO and Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.
CARRIE SEID: Glow
Blue Zircon
2013
aluminum, mylar, silk, and acrylic
14″x 14″x 3″
“Painting and sculpture are too categorically limited for the emotional states of being that Carrie Seid so elegantly conjures up. Smoke and shadow, dissipation and loss, energy and anatomy – these physical references bring us closer to the ineffable life forces at the core of these mysterious assemblages.” Gerry Craig, Sculpture Magazine, July/August 2000
The experience of seeing Carrie Seid’s artwork is one of wonder and beauty. Although her wall sculptures physically extend only a few inches from their supports, they seem to contain bottomless, luminous pools of jewel-like color and light. Constructed of aluminum, mylar, and silk, Seid’s sculptural forms are designed to catch, hold and reflect light creating an illusionistic space, focusing on light as a metaphor for hope and human emotion.
Covered by a taut skin of translucent silk, steadied and supported by thin ribs, visible only as rhythmic pulses just under the surface, Seid’s forms are mirage-like, mysterious and self-contained. Their structures echo nature, more similar to the many curvilinear forms of a chambered nautilus shell than anything human made.
Originally, from Chicago, Carrie Seid maintains a full time fine and public art practice at her Tucson, Arizona. Seid received her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she was a Merit Scholar and earned her B.F.A. from The Rhode Island School of Design. Seid has been awarded numerous public art commissions and is represented in the permanent collection of Tucson Museum of Art. This is Seid’s first exhibition in Kansas City.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11-5pm & by appointment.