Starry, Starry Nights: Five Light-Filled Installations
curated by June Mattingly, featuring artists Adela Andea, Chris Lattanzio, Jeremy McKane, Susie Rosmarin and Billy Zinser
Large Gallery
Adela Andea
Adela Andea’s fluorescent tube wall sculptures will radiate in light the largest gallery on the longest wall. Andea’s light sculptures powered exclusively by manmade electronics will submerge one wall in the biggest space into an ambiguous and mystifying landscape. Her “futuristic eco-systems” use intricately weaved circuits of LED and CFL lights, computer hardware and manufactured building materials, consumer electronics and mass produced objects to embody both a physical presence as well as ethereal sensibility. These free-form, exuberant sculptures with jutting bolts of lights and organic explosion of electrical parts and whirring fans make the visitor wish to celebrate.
These dazzling light displays take the legacy of Flavin’s eloquent minimalism and are “reminiscent of an Eastern European disco.” Romanian-born, Adela lives and works in Denton and teaches at the University of North Texas while completing an MFA in New Media. In 2011 she had a solo show at Anya Tish’s prestigious gallery in Houston who represents her and she is represented in Dallas by Cris Worley’s gallery.
Susie Rosmarin
The stunning paintings of Susie’s literally light up and move in sync from their private space on the canvas. The perception of light exudes or jumps out from tight linear overlapping patterns designed in brilliant, clearly defined color combinations and sharp, synchronized glowing white backgrounds. The inescapable attraction to her paintings is they defy the limitations of two-dimensionality in their charged up, conceivably moving environment of color and light.
While mathematics play a central role in her work, Susie’s exacting and skillful method of executing the overlapping grids is inspired by fractal geometry and the Op Art movement in the 1960s, hard-edge abstraction, the observation of constant pattern, repetition and geometry in observed objects around us every day in our living encounters. This complicated mathematical formula is based on each layer of the color pattern arrangement being taped, painted, waited on to dry and repeated.
Susie, a Houston-based artist received a BA from the University of St. Thomas in Houston and an MFA from Pratt Institute in New York. The permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the McNay in San Antonio, and the Houston Museum of Fine
Arts own her pieces. She is represented by Dunn and Brown Contemporary in Dallas, the Texas Gallery in Houston and the Danese Gallery in New York.
Square Gallery
Jeremy McKane
Jeremy McKane’s underwater photography and a video will submerge us in color and action in the square gallery. I like the effect of light on darkness, the way the darkness attracts your eye to the colors and allows you to experience a colorful ballet right before your eyes. This effect works well in stills as well as video which is why his exhibition has both still photos as well as video. Jeremy will install eight 6 x 4 foot photographs in hand constructed aluminum mountings designed to have the photograph an exact 90 degrees from the viewer’s eye to the surface of the print. Jeremy believes the job of any photographer is to tell a story – a little cliché but true. He’s always been intrigued by photography and remembers when he was very little and his grandmother bought him a Polaroid camera. He had so much fun taking pictures of things that were funny or interesting and suddenly realized he was telling a story without words.
“We are all time travelers and my job as a photographer is to stop you from looking at your world that travels at the speed of light and come down to a stationary speed where everything stops, everything is in sync.”
– Jeremy McKane
New Works Space
Chris Lattanzio
Chris Lattanzio will feature a light and sound Installation “Lotus Room” in the New Works Space. In Buddhism, lotus flowers mean purity of speech, mind and body rising above the waters of desire and attachment; Chris will create a room immersion in line and color and “space for contemplation and healing.”
Chris is creating his first installation to be viewed as an environment “to walk around inside my art” with 3-D lines and beaming light across the surfaces of the people and the backgrounds. He literally paints with light to take the realm of painting from pigment to spectral color. There will be a 10 minute cycle of lights, solid colors, patterns and sequences running 5 times an hour with intermissions of pure white light. In addition to sculpture lights each wall in the gallery will be colored with LED fixtures to create a rare but soothing type of pictorial wall space.
Chris met Donald Judd in Marfa while working on music and a video for a pop group. Another important influence on his art is Dan Flavin, a contemporary and friend of Judd’s during the 60s – both “blew the boundaries between the historically specific qualities of painting and sculpture.”
Roof
Billy Zinser
Billy Zinser’s inflatable 20-foot tall MACRODON sculpture will brighten up the roof of The MAC. MACRODON is modeled after the clichéd used car dealership inflatable purple gorilla to activate a mundane outdoor spaces, resulting in unexpected pop-up exhibitions with the potential for spontaneous guerilla appearances as a sort of art happening. Through the various incarnations of his work, “my objective is to broaden the scope and reach of art, connecting the dots between painting, plastic collectable toys, and projects of large-scale installation sculpture; making artwork that can be accessed through a variety of conduits and increase public interaction with art.” By embracing the pop-aesthetic of the designer toy phenomenon made mainstream by KidRobot and others, he depicts these imaginary figures dubbed MACRODONS, with simple gestures and minimal visual information through various incarnations, including limited edition MACRODONS plastic art toys, oversize sculptural installations, and video animations. A new video will be presented in the indoor reception space.
Billy is a recipient of the Dallas Museum of Art’s juried Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund and represented by Public Trust, which gave him a one-person, a gallery that specializes in the newest talent. Billy has studied art abroad, one year at the Art Institute of Chicago and has a BA from the University of Texas in Austin. Additional exhibitions/awards include “Juror’s Choice Award” at 500X Gallery, “Choice Cuts” at the Dallas Art Fair and “Art+Object” at Marty Walker Gallery, Dallas.
About the curator: June Mattingly
June’s gallery during the 80s occupied the Post building in front of the MAC; Mattingly Baker discovered young Texas talent such as Jesus Moroles, Mary McCleary and Melissa Miller and showed established artists like Judd, Schnabel and Rauschenberg. Her curatorial experience encompasses 10 gallery shows annually and 20 shows at Frito-Lay’s headquarters. Her contacts in Texas continually expand in preparation for publishing a book on Texas art and as a weekly contributor since 2009 to a wide Internet audience on regularmain.com, moderndallas.net, modaustin.net and modernhouston.net.
