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Shona Macdonald & Ray Charles White
April 5 – May 12, 2002.
Open Wednesday - Sunday, Noon – 5pm and by appointment.
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Special installation by Bay Area conceptual artist David Ireland
Preview the art of Shona Macdonald >>
Preview the art of Ray Charles White >>
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"Concentrics I, II, III" - Ray Charles White
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CONFLUENCE opening April 5 at Julie Baker Fine Art features the work of SHONA MACDONALD of Chicago and RAY CHARLES WHITE of New York. These artists both work with water imagery but employ methods that demonstrate the dynamic range in contemporary painting practices. In Macdonald's envelope series, she creates rivers and seascapes with the innards of envelopes. From distance the works resemble flowing, earthy landscapes. Close-up viewing reveals the literalness of the found image. Ray Charles White captures the fleeting beauty of water in a series of aluminum multiples. Exploring the emotions and personality of water, White photographs in nature and then plays with surface, texture and technology to create the enamel on aluminum series. Heralded by Henry Geldzahler, White like his mentor David Hockney, effectively blurs the line between photography and painting.
Shona Macdonald, a Scottish artist working in Chicago, has been praised for her affecting work that surprises with it charms and tossed histories. She collects neglected everyday materials. With the care of a manicurist, Macdonaldassembles clippings from envelopes into collages that echo the lyricism of wind blown leaves, tranquil brain waves, sun light seas. The intimacy and enormity of Mac Donald's vision, insists on a natural cycle of dross and creativity. A recent Chicago exhibition ironically titled "It Looks Easy" highlighted "MacDonald's "180 Envelope Innards", a "painting" that consists of thin strips cut from the insides of envelopes and layered horizontally on the canvas. Her diversity of designs is remarkable and the whole appears as a richly embroidered cloth, quilt, or some kind of needlework. " Chicago Art Critic John Brunetti describes MacDonald's work as "quirky yet formally elegant meditative works of horizontal bands and undulating waves."
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"Envelopes With Rivers" - Shona Macdonald
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In the traditions of the best collage and the best painting, MacDonald's work boldly shares her process so we can count the waves with her as she dazzles with a final orchestration of visual energy, a noisy quiet. Visual Arts Magazine comments that "MacDonald's abstractions have a tight linear structure that in Sea of Envelopes, takes on a wavelike motion. They convey an aura of obsessive ness...or they speak of traditionally feminine aesthetic tasks such as weaving and of the necessary human work of sorting, saving, and transforming: finding usefulness and beauty in what blows up against the threshold."
Ray Charles White is an accomplished and celebrated portrait photographer. In Graphis Magazine, Henry Geldzahler called him a " charmer with a photo fixation". Geldzahler heralded Ray Charles White among his 14 favorite artists in New York Magazine. David Hockney's well known portrait of Ray Charles White is an indication of the rich social/artistic dialogue that generates White's work. Like Hockney, concerns for surface, transfer, fracture, nature and portrait link White's work.
The worked that launched White's high profile career of silk screen celebrity portraits (from William Burroughs to Bill Clinton) lead to the work in the CONFLUENCES show. Powerful enamel photo transfer images on to metal explore repetition, fluency, urgency, and tranquility. He is the generation after Warhol, that exploits graphic simplicity with an edgy contemporary sophistication. Ray Charles Whites work has been exhibited and published all over the world.
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