FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to present Peripheries of Narrative, our Inaugural Summer Guest Curatorial Project, curated by visual artist Kim Anno, Associate Professor at The California College of the Arts. Anno chose five California College of the Arts 2006 MFA Graduates - Michele Carlson, Susan Chen, Katie Lewis, Weston Teruya, and Jamie Vasta - whose work represents a kaleidoscope of storytelling in painting, drawing, video and installation. Exhibition dates are June 1 through July 15, 2006. Reception for the artists is June 1, 5:30 - 7:30 p.m. Please also join us for an artists' talk with Guest Curator Kim Anno on Saturday, June 3, at 2:00 p.m.

Under a long shadow of American disaster both at home and around the world, these five young artists smoke out their own stories of pathetic glamour, re-mixed history, speculative fiction, quasi-science and disconcerting paradise. Several use contemporary strategies of drawing to construct their images and all address the legacy of painting in a fresh light. They are at the crossroads of a new wave of narrative visual experiments. The resulting work is haunting, elegant, hilarious, dark and ultimately empathic.

Susan Chen makes short video works that function between 19th-century illusion of frontier exploration and Romance painting. The look of her films is saturated in color and calls attention to the nature of illusion itself. Chen fell upon the mythical notion of the arctic Eden, the tropical paradise in the middle of a world of frozen oceans and glaciers, and crafted a ridiculous set out of the accoutrements of “hobby craft materials.” The subtext echoes with the impending doom of the melting glacier and the undeniable global catastrophe in the making. Chen utilizes consumer-end technology including a tiny spy camera that fits on the head of a ballpoint pen. The resulting works are mysterious, confounding, and entirely fascinating.

Jamie Vasta makes meticulously crafted glitter paintings that transform the inherent sadness of pathetic suburban landscapes. She talks about “Divine light as seen by National Geographic,” the magazine famous for its idealization, suspect sympathies, and beautiful photographs. Through making works about nature Vasta began to gravitate toward the conflict in the American love for strip malls, billboards, and fast food; but she cleverly embraces the cheap mass glamour of the glitter as well as its inherent ecstatic beauty. They operate handsomely in the tradition of the high/low art duality.

Weston Teruya is a drawer who turns his experience as a teacher/counselor in a Los Angeles Juvenile Hall (which was situated on a country club golf course) into what he calls “speculative fiction.” His drawings spin with an open-ended story that combines the guardian figures of Asia with the country club's life preservers, lot barriers, piles of golf course sod, etc. The characters exist in an empty white space that allows the viewer to fill in the context. His refined and varied line work accommodates a suggestion of time passing and deep space. Something has happened, and we are never quite sure, but the implications are both difficult and hopeful.

Katie Lewis works in the materials of pins, thread, drawing and incised lines. Her drawings exist on the wall as installations or temporal drawings. Stretched threads attached to tiny pins create the lines. These works are sensitive abstractions that are derived from a narrative of her own physical sensation. Lewis records her sensations through a scientific visual strategy, and presents her findings as artwork. Her pieces are both frenetic and sensual - a hybrid between art and science.

Michele Carlson makes large-scale re-fined drawings of young hip hop women traveling to an imaginary location, sometimes by car, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a boat, and triumphantly on the tops of Roman columns. Carlson’s women are enjoying themselves as they assert their power. They wear skirts reminiscent of turn-of-the-century European designs, with African and Asian patterns on them. Their appearance suggests a kind of post conflict era recalling the image of revolutionaries relaxing with their boots on the fancy furniture of the aristocracy.