June 14 – July 10, 2019 | Glitched: Nina Tichava and Shawn Smith
Nina Tichava – Do you want to know how it feels (Lantern Series)
Turner Carroll Gallery is pleased to announce Glitched, an exhibition of artworks by California College of the Arts alumni Nina Tichava and Shawn Smith. While Tichava and Smith vary vastly in their medium and creative process, they both explore the intersections of culture, technology, and the environment through their art practices. Tichava’s offsetting of the visual linear code in her works alters the geometric form from what we expect to perceive. Smith, who conceives his sculptures by viewing images of animals through a pixelated computer screen, plays with how an image of an animal is mutated by changing the computer code within the digital image. Of course this mutated animal image is a metaphor for what happens to animals in reality when we alter their food and environment. Thus, all the animals Smith renders are on the verge of extinction.
A process-driven artist, Tichava painstakingly hand-produces effects and patterns that at first glance look as though they may have been produced by a computer or industrial machine, but upon closer inspection reveal the depth, nuance, and humanity of the artist’s hand. Her mixed media pieces are deeply layered and complex. The influence of her New Mexico upbringing in a family of weavers is evident in the overt textile-like layering of thin slices of paper. Woven textures and washes are eventually obscured further by a field of opaque white paint that at once defines geometric the forms and the space the forms occupy. Thousands of beads of paint are set into ordered grids that disintegrate as they grow outward. These multi-faceted layers of warp and weft, the rich amalgam of hybrid color, and the deconstructed grids in Tichava’s intricate works allude to the technical malfunctions or glitches in lines of code that can cause visual disruptions to appear in digital images.
Growing up in a large city where his experience of the natural world was mostly limited to the digital environment of computer and TV screens, Shawn Smith renders images of the natural world into three-dimensional sculptures. Isolating the subject from the frame and distilling its color palette down to the minimum—-just enough information to be identifiable-—he builds three-dimensional representation pixel by pixel with hand-cut, hand-dyed strips of wood. His process is intentionally laborious to contrast with the modern culture of rapidly consuming online images, and also punctuates how important each pixel is in informing the identity of an object or being. The pieces in Glitched undergo further manipulations, as in the forced distorted perspective of “Stretch” and “Squish” where Smith has recreated, in three-dimensional form, the visual effect of “stretching” or “squishing” the aspect ratio of a digital photograph.
Opening Reception Friday, June 14, 2019 from 5 to 7pm
June 22 – July 9, 2018 | Science as Art: Shawn Smith, Rusty Scruby, and Matthew Shlian
Opening Reception Friday, June 22, 5-7pm
In conjunction with Smith and Scruby’s exhibition at Grace Museum in Texas, and Matthew Shlian’s Frederick Hammersley Residency and Wonder Cabinet at Tamarind Institute.
“After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well.” Albert Einstein
The realms of science and art are often considered mutually exclusive; the right hemisphere of the brain is thought to control our artistic and creative abilities, while the left our mathematical and logical skills; science is viewed as linear and precise, whereas art is accepted as open to individual interpretation. However, in Turner Carroll Gallery’s exhibition, Science as Art, artists Shawn Smith, Rusty Scruby, and Matthew Shlian explore the intersectionality between science and art, using their works to deconstruct the categorizations generally used to dichotomize the two subjects. Here, science is used as a medium in the same way as paint or plaster, touching on subjects such as technology, mathematical relationships, and the natural world in a way that uses scientific principles and processes to evoke aesthetic beauty and provoke audience response within the various pieces.
Work in the exhibition may be viewed here.
For more information and high resolution images, please visit https://turnercarrollgallery.com/press-area/ or info@turnercarrollgallery.com
May 16, 2012 | Greg Murr and Shawn Smith Now at Turner Carroll Gallery
Greg Murr
Shawn Smith
We are very pleased to say that we are representing two new artists, Greg Murr and Shawn Smith. Greg is an artist we know well, having shown his work in the 1990s before he moved to Germany. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Progressive Collection, among others.
Shawn Smith came to us via collectors in Dallas. His work is sculptural with an aesthetic built on the digital idea of a pixel but rendered in wood. His most recent work is focused on how we experience nature through technology.
For Murr, the arc of nature runs deep within his practice. A fascination with the way the observable world exists outside our everyday awareness guides his work. Since 2008, Murr’s work has featured dogs with their noses to the ground, relying upon instincts to guide them, loose among a world of tangled pearls or fashion’s latest high-heels.