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Erin Noel, "The Divide: Notes on Landscape and Memory"
October 10 – November 29, 2003
Opening Friday, October 10, 6 PM - 8 PM.
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Special installation by Bay Area conceptual artist David Ireland
"Aerial 1", oil on canvas, 2003, 40 x 40 inches |
>> Preview artwork by Erin Noel
Over the past year and a half, Julie Baker Fine Art has surprised the Sacramento and Sierra Foothills region with contemporary art that resonates with collectors from New York to San Francisco while drawing from both urban and local artists. By bringing known artists from major urban centers to local collectors and local artists to international collectors, Baker has carved out a unique niche in the Northern California.
In October of 2003, Julie Baker will continue the trend of blending contemporary art and a respect for the rural environment in a show of the work of Erin Noel, an artist local to the Sierra Foothills. Noel will bring a new perspective to the gallery with a digital installation piece. This multimedia installation takes its inspiration from her ongoing two-dimensional work that explores the impact of the fragmented and divided landscape of California. She will also show oil paintings and mixed-media pieces.
Noel is not only an artist but also an environmental attorney who has chosen to return to this region after attending law school in Berkeley and brief stints working in regions ranging from Washington, D.C. to the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work reflects this diversity of experience.
Noel describes the pieces that will be shown as aspects of her continued exploration of the paradoxes that are a part of our relationship with the land. "Our fragmented landscape impresses itself upon our minds and the way we think and perceive, shapes the land," says Noel. "The landscape is like a picture of our experience—including all of the tension between order and the wild, between our attempts to divide and control that which we perceive and the reality that the natural world and ourselves cannot be predictably or entirely ordered or controlled." Noel’s pieces mimic and explore this landscape with a vivid palette and formal composition that is at once ordered and democratic across the painted surface, while also containing a loose style that draws from abstract expressionism and Latin American art.
Noel is also working on integrating traditional media and emerging media, such as internet and video media. "Contemporary artists have finally thrown out the rules—there are no genres, no need to separate the passionate and the conceptual, no need to avoid meaning or to ignore the thinking process in art," Noel says. She has embarked into the world of digital, computer-based medium "for the way that it represents the completely human-created reality, and because of the paradoxical intimacy one can experience when interacting, alone, with an image you can in some way affect or manipulate." She says she has stuck with the traditional media "because of the visceral pleasure I take in making beautiful objects of wood, canvas, paint, metal, color. The real, physical world can’t be beat."
Noel’s show, "The Divide: Notes on Landscape and Memory," can be viewed at Julie Baker Fine Art beginning October 10, 2003 with a reception for the artist from 6 to 8pm. Arttalk and demonstration of digital installation, Friday, October 24, 6pm.The show continues through November 29, 2003.
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