invites you to Comments… A Gallery Conversation
Saturday, February 27 at 3pm

Please join Carla Gannis in conversation with critic, historian, and artist Robert C. Morgan and artists Mary Ann Strandell and Kim Keever as they discuss Gannis’s work and their own practices in the context of romanticism, hybridity, and mediated narrative.

Comments… takes place on the closing day of Gannis’s latest solo exhibition What’s not on my mind?
A wine reception will follow at 4:30 pm

INTRODUCING THE PARTICIPANTS:

Dr. Robert C. Morgan, Professor Emeritus in Art History at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is an internationally renowned art critic, curator, artist, writer, art historian, poet, and lecturer. He is the author of numerous books and some 2000 essays and reviews. His curatorial projects number over 70, and they have been exhibited in museums, cultural spaces and galleries in the United States and abroad. As an artist, from the late 1960s to the present, Morgan has been represented nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions.
Image: Robert C. Morgan, Purgation of Nike (1974-1984/2009). Courtesy of the artist and the Lab Gallery.

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Mary Ann Strandell has exhibited widely in art galleries, museums, and art spaces nationally and internationally. Her works are a movable terrain between image, media, and their myriad histories. In her paintings she blends utopias from California Moderne and asian-inspired chinoiserie. In her 3D prints, she plays off of the deep visual complexity of her paintings and adds these elements interspersed in the hyperbolic constructions of 3D lenticular prints. Her work combines a traditional studio practice with digital technologies and new media.
Image: Mary Ann Strandell, Bedroom Waterfall, 3D lenticular print on sintra, 2007

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Kim Keever’s painterly panoramas represent a continuation of the landscape tradition, as well as an evolution of the genre. Referencing a broad history of landscape painting, especially that of Romanticism, the Hudson River School and Luminism, they are imbued with a sense of the sublime. However, they also show a subversive side that deliberately acknowledges their contemporary contrivance and conceptual artifice. He has exhibited extensively in galleries throughout the United States and abroad.
Image: Kim Keever, Summer: Blue, Yellow and Gray, 2004, C-print

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Carla Gannis is an artist, educator, and interactive designer. The digital paintings and interactive artworks she produces deliver nostalgic-futurist visions, pleasure-principled dystopias, and myth-based mash ups wrapped in sharp-eyed, but softly rendered social metaphor. She invites viewers to experience their inescapably mediated lives “through the looking glass”, where sexuality, power, and class issues reverberate in idiosyncratic juxtapositions.
Image: Carla Gannis, Bridge of Sighs (Day), 2004, C-print

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COMMENTS…Romanticism, Hybridity & Mediated Narrative
In the 2005 exhibition essay for Ideal Worlds | New Romanticism in Contemporary Art, curators Max Hollein and Martina Weinhart describe the abundant misinterpretations that surround the original German Romantic movement. “In everyday language, the term [Romanticism] is generally used in a reduced sense meaning sentimental, far from civilization, full of atmosphere, rapturous, picturesque. This use has only little to do with the actual movements complex character. The Romantic spirit aims at more than the paradisiacal and the beautiful; it also includes the subversive tenor of transcending limitations…” Hollein and Weinhart continue by bringing to light the work of contemporary artists who have “taken up a thread of the Romantic spirit” albeit with a postmodern needle that implements new media methods.

To varying degrees, Carla Gannis, Mary Ann Strandell, and Kim Keever can each be described as New Romantic artists who involve conceptual hybridization and technology in their studio practices. Robert C. Morgan has published numerous commentaries on new media art, conceptual art, and modernism and he has long championed  “a return to aesthetics and an inner-directedness in art.”

Keever and Gannis find that much of their artistic practice stems from early childhood influences. In Keever’s case he and his family spent part of each year in a remote natural environment that he finds permanently ingrained in his soul. Gannis, who at a young age was introduced to the worldly nature of computing within the confines of a classically southern gothic town, employs digital technologies for the expression of visual and multimedia narratives.

In a review of both Keever’s and Strandell’s work, entitled “‘Beautiful Dreamer’ awakens Romantics” Strandell’s 3D lenticular prints are described as achieving an extreme form of visual impact that embraces the kind of digital space seen on the computer screen and Keever’s landscapes while likened to Turner’s, are singled out for their modern process and impressively original vision.

In a recent conversation about process, Strandell incisively queries “How do these practices ultimately reflect on the conditions of contemporary culture ?”  And one might add, particularly a faster and faster paced, pragmatically-natured digital culture?