Connotation, a group show featuring works by Miles McMillan, Isobel Wohl, Alexandria Tarver, and Samuel Caleb Englander, is prefaced with the understanding that to rationally account for painting within artistic practice is more often than not a confounding endeavor. Each of the artists here, however, approaches the medium of painting without apology, as a means of translating their own aesthetic, conceptual, and contextual creation. Together, the presentation of works in Connotation operates as a conversation of painting that is both self-reflexive and as it relates to the various methods of creation.
Miles McMillan embraces the effectiveness of traditional figure painting as a means of crafting a compelling image, actively exploiting the universal human fascination of seeing other people to reach his audience. These disconcerting self-portraits of the artist appear in response to the perceived narcissism and increasing instantaneity of photographic culture.
Isobel Wohl’s ambiguous imagery built on emphatically tactile canvases offers an inescapable awareness of painting as, above all else, a process. Due to the nature of their construction, these paintings have the presence of objects as Wohl’s painterly sensibility extends to the third dimension. This sensibility naturally extends and beautifully manifests itself in her fiber works, where intricate lines of fabric amass into individual substances, and in her etchings, whose impact relies more on aquatint and washes of dark and light than on intricate line detail.
Alexandria Tarver adopts the tradition of pure painting as a means of spatial representation. However, the spaces represented in her work are unexplained fragments of the built environment taken from their original context and framed within the inexplicable language of painting. There is a critique, or awareness, here implied of the affectivity these overlooked structures induce and an attempt by Tarver to use painting a guarded disclosure of direct experience.
In his work, Samuel Caleb Englander incorporates the language of abstract painting practice, the ability of the medium of painting itself to provide formal compositions that act towards the end of a sublime expression. The imposition of text on the surfaces of the canvas, however, self-consciously causes the paintings to be read on multiple levels. Englander’s approach to painting is therefore indeed a symptom of his approach to art-making, his exploration of various mediums as tools of communicating with and summoning the audience to participate in the artist’s own disparate, seemingly contradictory, and deeply relatable thoughts.
Installation View
Samuel Caleb Englander
Eclipse
Video
43 minutes
2011
Samuel Caleb Englander 17,649
81 acrylic on canvas paintings
97 x 97 inches
2011
Isobel Wohl
dark rotting bone
Silk and mohair yarn, handwoven by the artist
7 x 9 ¼ inches
2011
Alexandria Tarver
I guess some things are different #stars
Oil on linen
15 x 12 inches
2011
Alexandria Tarver
mailbox
Oil on canvas
48 x 72 inches
2011
Isobel Wohl
the kid with the eggshell skull
Oil on linen
9 x 12 inches
2011
Miles McMillan
Untitled
Oil on canvas
60 x 36 inches
2011
Miles McMillan
Untitled
Oil on canvas
60 x 36 inches
2011
Isobel Wohl soft bone
3 pieces, silk and mohair yarn, handwoven by the artist
height 9 ¼ inches, width variable
2011
Samuel Caleb Englander
September 1978
46 x 68 inches
Acrylic on canvas
2011
Alexandria Tarver
i don't understand why people complain about not being able to see the stars in the city. i mean, they're up there- at least on the south side of town at a time when eyes are quick to close #stars
15 x 12 inches
Oil on linen
2011
Alexandria Tarver
grey ky
18 x 24 inches
Oil on panel
2011
Alexandria Tarver
#seeingspots
12 x 9 inches
Oil on panel
2011
Isobel Wohl
nest print
Etching and aquatint with chine collé on paper
Plate size 5 x 6 inches, paper 15 x 14 inches
2011
Alexandria Tarver
Untitled
Oil on panel
9 x 6 inches
2011
Isobel Wohl
still life (yarn skein)
Oil on linen
9 x 12 inches
2011
