ASPEN: Relevance

Nathaniel Donnett, How to Get Rich On A Shoestring Budget, 2010, Shoestrings and plastic on paper bags, 56 x 51 inches.
Image via nathanieldonnett.com. All rights reserved.

Perspectives of the African American Experience

June 27 – September 8, 2014

Featuring Derrick Adams, Nathaniel Donnett, Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry

Discussion with artist Derrick Adams: July 15, 2014, 6 – 8 pm

Discussion with artists Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry: August 7, 2014, 6 – 8 pm

QUINTENZ GALLERY

Residences at The Little Nell Building

501 East Dean Street

Aspen, CO

From quintenzgallery.com:

This summer Quintenz Gallery presents Relevance, an exhibition of four artists’ interpretation of the ongoing and evolving narrative that is the African American and American experience. Artwork by Derrick Adams, Nathaniel Donnett, and Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry comprises new shifts in contemporary art practices and media while addressing complicated and multivalent issues of race, community, and power.

Any discussion of race in America—even one focusing on representation—is not just about images. It is about human bodies that are informed by notions of ethnicity rooted in a specific time and place. It is about the public and private interactions between these bodies and how they coexist. And, it is about how such realities impact the distribution of power within social areas we navigate daily, from the interpersonal to the geopolitical.

Derrick Adams destabilizes urban and identity politics through performance, collage, sculpture, and installation. In Relevance, Adams’ mixed-media collages rupture visual and symbolic lines between human figures and domestic architectural spaces. Bodies, structures, and landscapes emerge from cut scraps of popular lifestyle magazines in artwork reflecting today’s fragmented, over-inundated visual culture. Adams’ visually rich surfaces depict his own socio-cultural moment and investigation. “I draw from my own experiences and come up with my own philosophies and perspective on art making,” Adams says. An interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, Derrick Adams received a MFA from Columbia University and a BFA in Art & Design from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Nathaniel Donnett explores the psychosocial relationships between the collective and individual, the perceptions of the self and society, while drawing from the inventiveness, psychology, improvisation and music in African American culture. Donnett works in mixed media, drawings, paintings, installation, sculpture, video, and performance using everyday materials, and objects. In this exhibition these particular drawings considers the figurative as other and psychosocial symbolism of brown paper bags and mixed media works with plastic. His artwork is an investigation of identity, perceptions of beauty, self-reflection, and societal contradiction and consent. Donnett, a 2010 Artadia winner, lives and works in Houston, Texas and studied at Texas Southern University.

Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry are a mixed-race artists’ collaborative since 1998. Their work, exhibited globally, moves fluidly beween large scale projects, painting, photography, video, and self-portraiture. McCallum & Tarry focus their work on community, race, identity, and injustice, creating art to preserve moments in time that might otherwise become nothing more than faded photographs. They reimagine historic and iconic photographic images, thereby reviving, continuing, and deepening narratives which may have become static. The artists live in Brooklyn, New York. McCallum holds an MFA from Yale and Tarry completed the Whitney ISP program in 2003.

Exhibit Link