Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present a solo show by San Francisco-based artist MICHELLE BLADE in Gallery 1 and in Gallery 2, two installations by JOS� LERMA that will expand on his already expansive vision of painting.The shows will open with a reception that is free and open to the public on Friday, April 8th from 5 to 8pm.
For her first solo show at Western Exhibitions Cast & Cascade, MICHELLE BLADE brings together painting and sculpture to create an environment in which the past and present are interlaced. Influenced by Romanticism and West Coast utopic idealism, Blade's mystical paintings mine the nostalgia of a bygone era, simultaneously marking a passing moment while looking forward into an unknown with cosmic reverie.
Using a variety of materials such as Dura-lar, lace, wood, paper and found objects, the resulting installation is a meditation on dualities: the real and unreal, light and dark, presence and absence. Painted wall tapestries, urns containing the ashes of past burned paintings, assorted paintings of anonymous figures, book covers, and Tarot card sessions rest on top of wooden shelves. Along with a white lace sculpture of a chair, these items call to mind the theoretical discourse concerning painting's own life and death. These works seek to create an engagement with individuals while simultaneously questioning the effectiveness of its methods and the potential of all such quests. Ultimately, these works serve as a reminder of man's persistent isolation and the persistent and timeless desire to connect with something beyond ourselves
Michelle Blade's work has been featured at Triple Base, Jack Hanley, SFMOMA, and Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, San Francisco; the San Jose ICA; Carl Berg Gallery and Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles; Space 1026, Philadelphia; Union Gallery, London; V1 Gallery, Copenhagen; the Akademie der Bildenden K�nste, St�ttgart and her painted Dura-lar rug was included here at Western Exhibitions in Ryan Travis Christian's group show "The Power of Selection, Part 3". She is a 2007 recipient of the Murphy-Cadogan Fellowship, a 2011 Alternative Exposure Grant recipient as well as recent SFMOMA SECA finalist. She received her MFA in painting from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Blade currently lives in Oakland, Ca. where she directs Sight School, an alternative artist run storefront.
In Gallery 2
Jos� Lerma The Lightweight
In The Lightweight, also the title of the show, JOSE LERMA has screenprinted a cartoon, published in 1880 in the French satirical newspaper "Le Charivari", relating to the Salon Exhibition of that year, in varnish, on a section of a large reflective curtain that is stretched to look like a painting. The caption from the cartoon reads (translated from French):
"A painter whose work is badly placed installed a telescope so that art lovers can see his picture for two sous*...which he gladly gives them."
This cartoon image, in clear varnish, will only be viewable when one is in-line with a light source. Mimicking the source material, Lerma points a telescope towards another stretched section of the reflective curtain which displays moth-holes on colorful cut-out circles taken from the artist's old sweater. Lerma states: "I was interested in the idea that, at the time of the salon, reputation and physical placement of a work were the same thing."
For the second piece, titled Rampant Mid-Careerism, Lerma stretches a Vietnam-era training parachute over several blank canvases that are hung salon-style and a larger photograph of a painting. The piece then rests on a synthesizer, set to arpeggio-mode, playing random "glass harmonica" sounds.
This is Jos� Lerma's first show with Western Exhibitions. His recent solo show at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York was reviewed in Artforum.com and Time Out New York. Lerma has exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Milwaukee Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, and the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture to name a few; as well as showing internationally with recent solo gallery exhibitions in Seoul, Berlin and Madrid. Lerma was born in Spain and raised in Puerto Rico, studied political science at Tulane and law at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before switching his major to art and earning his MFA. He was granted a year-long residency in Puerto Rico, attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the CORE Program (affiliated with the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX). Jos� Lerma lives and works in New York and Chicago, where he is on faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
*The sousoriginated as the solidus, a pure gold coin weighing 1/60th of a pound introduced by Diocletian around 301 AD. By the time when the cartoon wass printed, the term had come to mean an almost worthless coin.
