Mark Moore Gallery
2525 Michigan Avenue, A1
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Phone: 310.453.3031
Fax: 310.453.3831
Hours: Tuesday – Friday 10 – 5 pm,
http://www.markmooregallery.com
Ben Weiner
GlamTrance
May 19 – July 7, 2007
Opening Reception:
Saturday, May 19, 5-7pm
Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to announce new works by emerging young talent, Ben Weiner. In producing his stunningly realistic oil paintings, Weiner harnesses the subjective nature of perception in order to render everyday objects unfamiliar and strange. By photographing paint and luxurious ephemera at close range, then using the resulting image as his subject, Weiner creates works that pose a confusion of object, subject and medium. Although his technique is photorealism, the pearls, make-up, perfume and paint depicted are rendered at such proximity that they appear as alien landscapes and ominous seas. These fantastic terrains are undeniably disturbing and disorientating as the viewer searches the canvas for a recognizable subject matter, yet they remain enticing in their opulence and beauty. His works paradoxically serve as both accurate representation and unidentifiable abstraction, unsettling the often unquestioned nature of realism, beauty and truth. Weiner’s paintings transcend mere representation; the dramatic lighting and rich hues, combined with the inaccessibility of his sublime surfaces, produce an uncanny effect indicative – yet simultaneously critical – of a society inundated by images, governed by popular culture and the media.
“GlamTrance” defines a liminal, ecstatic experience of visual disorientation in which the fetishized glam objects I depict in my paintings collapse with the art objects that depict them.
Ben Weiner
Ben Weiner received his BA from Wesleyan University, Connecticut. He studied under Mexican muralist José Lazcarro and has worked closely with artists Jeff Koons, Kim Sooja and Amy Yoes as an assistant. He has exhibited his work widely across the United States and in Mexico and has participated in numerous art fairs, including Pulse New York and Pulse Miami Beach. Weiner lives and works in New York City; this will be his first solo show on the West Coast.
Project Room
Ali Smith
May 19 – July 7, 2007
Opening Reception:
Saturday, May 19, 5-7pm
Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to introduce work by artist Ali Smith in the Project Room. Through her use of impasto, energetic hues and bold forms, Smith produces abstract terrains that hover on the brink of disorder and chaos while simultaneously remaining playful and engaging. The fleeting, eclectic quality of her canvases is restrained by an aesthetic sense of composition and color, and the result is a delightful visual indulgence that exploits every possibility of paint. Smith manipulates her medium to create hugely varied landscapes; some areas two dimensional, calm planes, others burst forth from the surface as mountains of texture and color. It is the delectable, tactile, excessive quality that makes Smith’s work so appealing; the viewer must resist the child-like urge to plunge their fingers towards the canvas and further manipulate the paint, continuing Smith’s creative process.
The dichotomies expressed on each canvas verge on collapse while still maintaining the control of color and composition that give them their exciting exuberance, their willingness to be dangerous and their ultimate success.
Ali Smith received her MFA from California State University where she was awarded a Fine Arts scholarship. She completed an artist’s residency at Stichting Kaus Australis in the Netherlands and has exhibited in Europe, Japan and the United States. Smith’s work has been shown in the Mark Moore Gallery booth at Pulse New York and Art Chicago thus far this year. Her work is included in, amongst other collections, the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation. She lives and works in Long Beach, CA.
For more information on these artists or the opening event, please contact the gallery at 310.453.3031, info@markmooregallery, or http://www.markmooregallery.com
