2 – 3pm: Lilian Garcia-Roig will discuss her current exhibition, Sight-Specific.
Sight-Specific is a selection of recent large-scale works and groupings that depict the dense forest landscapes from Northern Florida and Georgia as well as the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. Many works in the exhibition are from two on-going series: Cumulative Nature and Hyperbolic Nature. Garcia-Roig paints outdoors, a method art historically known as en plein air, a French expression for “in the open air”. However, unlike the 19th Century Impressionist painters who sought to capture a single moment, Garcia-Roig paints over the course of an entire day placing an important emphasis on the performative aspects of on-site painting. The changing of light and passing of time is imperative to documenting a first hand and extended experience of nature. Both series in Sight-Specific represent the first groups of large-scale paintings produced in this manner (rather than over multiple half-day sessions as she had done before) continuing to increase the productive tension Garcia-Roig seeks between the materiality of paint and the optics of representation.
Garcia-Roig considers her current reinvestigations of the traditional plein air methodology as an act of defiance in a virtualized world that often lacks unmediated or meaningful experiences with nature. In Garcia-Roig’s paintings there is an immediate sense of the temporal and sublime, that nature is intoxicatingly near and yet unreachable.
Lilian Garcia-Roig was born in Havana, Cuba, moving to Texas at age five. She grew up in Houston and was a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin until 2000 when she moved to Tallahassee where she currently lives and is a Professor at Florida State University. Garcia-Roig earned her BFA from Southern Methodist University in 1988 and her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA in 1990. She has since exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums. She has held fellowships at the MacDowell Colony in 2006 and 2008 as well as the Vermont Studio Center in 1994 and at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1991. Garcia-Roig also received an individual artist fellowship from the state of Florida in 2008, the highly prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting in 2006, an NEA Mid-America Arts Alliance Award in Painting in 1994 and a Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art in 1992. In October of this year, she will be a Visiting Artist at Southern Methodist University. Lilian Garcia-Roig has been represented in Dallas by Valley House Gallery and Sculpture Garden since 1991.
Lilian Garcia-Roig Saturation Points will be on view at Valley House Gallery until September 21, 2013. She will give an artist talk at Valley House Gallery on September 14 at 11:00am. This is in conjunction with a formal presentation she will be giving as a part of SMU’s Visiting Artist Lecture Series, on October 9, at 7:00 pm.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
