This exhibition will be strikingly conceptual in its trajectory, as Brillhart departs from her usual, more academic, painting style. Still seeking to pursue her constant concerns with the spaces she inhabits or passes by, she arrives at this new work through material more closely concerned with these subjects. The show consists of drywall paintings, sculptural collages, and gritty black-and-white photography-based images.
In the drywall paintings, Brillhart arranges pieces of sheetrock in open boxes. She gives the structure many coats of paint, and then records a trace of the shadows cast within the box. The shadows reflect and retain the soft light of her warehouse studio in Little Haiti. When these �paintings� are shown, they will have two sets of shadows, one recalling the time of making, and the other marking a constantly changing moment in time; the time of the viewer viewing.
To understand how exciting these pieces are, it is important to note that the past few years witness a tectonic shift in Brillhart�s work. Her painting Pink Wall (2008), included in a group exhibition called Tuttle at David Castillo Gallery, shows a closely cropped detail of the wall of a concrete building, whose features are a vent, two windows, electrical piping and a metal electrical box. The composition is austere. There is a pull between the abstraction indicated in her composition and the representational role of her style. Since then she�s worked through several approaches, gradually moving in a more theoretical direction. With this show, Brillhart has found the will to set aside entirely the restrictions that come with representational painting. She felt, �the paint was getting in the way,� and wanted to use the paint as material functioning for the subject, not just as a descriptor.
Brillhart explores the force and texture of space in this new work, combining a variety of media, points of view, and levels of abstraction. She takes the content and process further, focusing on subtle elements, allowing each work to resonate more, with less. She seeks out substance in nothingness, where substance is material and value, and nothingness is light.
Brillhart graduated Cum Laude from the New York Academy of Art in 2003. Before that she studied with The Art Students League in New York, briefly attended the University of New Hampshire and gained her BA from Smith College in Massachusetts. She is published in several places including the Miami Contemporary Artists book by Paul Clemence and Julie Davidow and in New American Paintings, a juried annual publication. Her work was included in New Work Miami, curated by Rene Morales and Peter Boswell, at Miami Art Museum in Summer 2010. She has exhibited in New York, Miami and Berlin. Her work is currently on view at Dorsch Gallery, Miami and Kuckei and Kuckei Gallery, Berlin. She lives and works in Miami.
Paul Myoda: Glittering Machines Friday, April 8, 2011 - Saturday, May 7, 2011
Since 2008, Myoda has been working on cybernetic sculptures, which are dynamic, interactive works of art that investigate and borrow from various biological systems (i.e., communicational, behavioral, and environmental). In an age where the screen mediates every single one of our computing experiences, the field of cybernetic sculpture is in a breakout moment. Myoda states the basis for this claim: �The graphic user interfaces that allow us to interact with our computers and other electronic devices are beginning to feel too narrow, too constricting, too separating, too disembodied.�
Behind Myoda�s multi-faceted sculptural project is the passionate conviction that exploring different ways for computation to exist and interact physically in our world will combat this century�s version of alienation. His work does this beautifully and with an engineer�s attention to intricate detail and functional potential. One of Myoda�s new machines Billowy Sconce (2010) looks like a cross between an intricately designed three-dimensional snowflake and a sea anemone, rendered with clear plastic and metal parts. Once activated, sensing a moving presence in the room, it shines light in multiple directions, creating a prismatic sculpture of angular crystalline forms, whose material is light. Another sculpture, Ratchet (2010), its graphic clover-like shape rendered in metal razor-sharp points, is utterly threatening. Attraction and intimidation are both survival mechanisms.
Sculptor Paul Myoda had a studio in the World Trade Center I in 2001, so he is attuned to the movement from trauma to utter disconnectedness, a feeling enhanced by living in a city where, especially right after September 11th, one avoids looking up, much less beyond one�s next step. Subsequent works encouraged citizens to look up again. In 2002, in memory of the tragic events of that day, he co-created a prism of searchlights for the WTC site. Tribute in Light is now an annual installation. In 2006 he proposed a synthetic star with Julian Laverdiere called Urban Lodestar, which was published in Popular Science, to give urbanites back what they cannot see: starlight.
By encouraging us to look, engage and respond, his works articulate nuances of our own ways of being in this world.
Paul Myoda received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1989 and his MFA from Yale University in 1994. He lists more than 40 exhibitions of sculptures, drawings and installations. He has also written for various art publications, including Art in America, Flash Art, and Frieze. From 1994�2006, he lived in New York, NY, co-founding an art production company, Big Room, and an architecture-ideas collaboration, Myoda + Ruy-Klein Architecture, and serving as an Adjunct Professor at The City College of New York. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The National Science Foundation, Warhol Foundation, and Howard Foundation, among others. In 2001, he participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Councilʼs World Views Program and had a studio on the 91st floor of WTC I. In March of 2002 he co-created the Tribute in Light in memory of the tragic events of 9/11, which has subsequently become an annual installation. Since 2006 he has been based in Rhode Island, where he is an Assistant Professor in the Visual Art Department at Brown University, teaching sculpture and new media. This is his first exhibition at Dorsch Gallery.
Brookhart Jonquil: Never Odd or Even Friday, April 8, 2011 - Saturday, May 7, 2011
�While my sculptures and installations are certainly tangible, they are in constant dialog with the virtual and formless. I use reflective surfaces to open up perceptual spaces within architecture, and I use solid forms to perceptually collapse physical spaces. Mirrors, glass, digital photographs, and everyday objects have material qualities that I use to probe the relationship between the physical and the virtual or intangible. In my work I attempt to access this paradoxical duality, creating uncanny situations where a space, an object, or a moment in time, seems to contradict its own existence.
An example of this could be Never Odd or Even. The installation is an anonymous studio or office consisting of a chair, a lamp, a table with a paperback book jammed under one foot, and a few other small items. The room is physically doubled to create a perceptual mirrored space, folding in on itself. Objects intersect with their doppelg�ngers and a concrete floor is disorientingly angled upside-down. The title of the piece is also the title of the paperback book that levels both tables in defiance of gravitational sense. The phrase is a palindrome, and speaks not only to the formal arrangement of the space, but of the inevitable failure of quantitative logic set up as an oppositional binary. The space is not one real table and one reflected table; they are equally real but equally contingent upon the other to define their reality.
Installations such as this can be understood in the context of contemporary information-based media. Copying and pasting, pushing and pulling architecture, achieving impossible forms that seem natural and effortless due to our aesthetic saturation with things that have been manipulated or created entirely out of digital ether. I use digital media to sketch out my spaces before I begin construction. This affords me not only a high degree of accuracy in my measurements when the time comes to build, but it allows me to fluidly manipulate forms in a weightless space where material is infinitely malleable. Most importantly, the objects and installations that I create from these sketches retain the qualities of their intangible origin, and take on an uncanny sense of the impossible.�
~ Brookhart Jonquil (February, 2011)
Dorsch Gallery introduced Jonquil�s work to Miami in the group show Bubble Raft in September 2010. In this work, called Looking Both Ways, the viewer climbs a short ladder to look at two mirrors set at 90�. The mirrors split the vision: one eye sees a dart stuck in the wall, the other eye sees a drawing of the same. The mind registers the two sources as a single reality. Never Odd or Even is Jonquil�s first solo show in South Florida. Jonquil received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. He has a BFA and BA (Art History), both Magna Cum Laude, from the University of Arizona. He studied at the Leipzig Academy of Art in Germany. His work has been shown in numerous venues in Chicago, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, the Web Biennial at the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, the Oriahovo Gallery of Art in Bulgaria and Apex Art in New York. He has received numerous awards, including two grants to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an individual artist grant from the Tucson Prima Arts Council, and a Creative Achievement Award from the University of Arizona. He is an instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.
