Dyeing, Merging, Multitasking

Dyeing, Merging, Multitasking
Mike Cloud, Jeff DeGolier, Shana Moulton, Dona Nelson
& Siebren Versteeg
Curated by Leeza Meksin
July 13 – August 18, 2013

Opening Reception:
Saturday, July 13, 7-10pm
 

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Dyeing, Merging, Multitasking, a group show organized by Leeza Meksin, bringing together works by Mike Cloud, Jeff DeGolier, Shana Moulton, Dona Nelson & Siebren Versteeg.

Exploring the role of painting in today’s hybrid art practices, this show focuses on the medium’s uncanny ability for absorption, making its conventions surprisingly robust and stable.

Dona Nelson’s double sided paintings insist on being considered from all sides, asking you to see the front and then the back, and then the front as you see the back, entering a new dimension through a pane glass window of the stretcher’s grid.  Stained, pierced and luminous with pools of color, the paintings are sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative, sometimes both; but always process based, powerful in scale, energetic and intuitive.

Jeff DeGolier’s grizzly objects hang on walls like well-behaved abstract paintings civilly playing music out of speakers, a car stereo tuner included.  The surfaces that reveal these speakers are encrusted with glass shards, trash and gravel, making their corporeal presence both an invitation and a threat.  In Jeff’s work, multitasking is an act of aggression, highlighting the blurring that’s occurring between utilitarian needs, luxury products and cultural artifacts.

Mike Cloud’s paintings exhibit both a relishing of the process and a quizzical irreverence towards the medium’s history.  Abandoning painterly norms for flamboyantly shaped canvases, he incorporates photographs, clothing and chunky text into objects that fluctuate between screens, murals, paintings and theatrical backdrops. A surprising de-inheritance emerges within a traditional genre, both rich and questionable in its class, gender and race implications.

The multi-media installations of Shana Moulton encompass performance, video, digital art and drawing into a practice that merges autobiography with references to consumer culture and new age mythologies. Funny and heartbreaking like Charlie Chaplin, Moulton’s self-portraiture is choreographed within a painterly convention that both resists and embraces the possibility of a wooden sign for “towels” becoming a portal into a transcendental awakening (as it does in Shana’s video Whispering Pines).

Siebren Versteeg’s digitally manipulated canvases are saturated with ink during the mechanical printing process, shaping a physical object with a unique surface through a digital logic.  Siebren’s algorithms guide the flow of information making paintings that invert today’s general shift of the Real into the virtual realm. Since we tend to view most paintings on our computer screens anyway, these objects present an interesting paradox, being both new digital media with a traditionally abstract painterly image, and physical objects that reveal something more when seen in person.

BIOS:
Mike Cloud has been featured in solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; the Gallery at Lincoln Center, New York; and the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Omaha, Nebraska; as well as group exhibitions at The Studio Museum, Harlem, New York; and White Columns, New York. His work can also be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Eileen Harris-Norton, Santa Monica; and the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery. Cloud earned his MFA in 2003 from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he was awarded the Barry Schactman Prize in Painting. Mike Cloud lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Mike Cloud at Meulensteen

Jeff DeGolier was born in Bellingham, WA, in 1974 to a family of fishermen, boat-builders, and immigrant socialist dockworkers. He received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2004), two BFA’s from the University of Washington in Seattle (2000), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2010). He has exhibited at Brennan & Griffin (NY, NY), Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, NY), Eli Ping Gallery (NY, NY), the Ulrich Museum of Art (Wichita, KS) the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (NY, NY), Howard House (Seattle, WA), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NY, NY), Soil Gallery (Seattle, WA), Consolidated Works (Seattle, WA), and the Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA). His work is collected by Bill and Ruth True, David Lewis, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. www.jeffdegolier.com

Shana Moulton earned a BFA from University of California, Berkeley (1999), an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2004) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2004) and De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2006). She has been an artist in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2011) and has received grants and fellowships from Harvestworks (2010), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2009), and the Experimental Television Center (2009). Her work has been included in the exhibitions The Castle of Secrets, Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam (2010); Puzzle Saga, Gimpel Fils, London (2010); Whispering Pines 6, 7, 8, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2010);  Greater New York Cinema, MoMA/PS1, Long Island City (2010); and Art in General, New York (2009). She has performed at the New Museum, NY (2011); The Kitchen, NY (2010); Exit Art, NY (2010); and Performa 09, NY (2009). www.shanamoulton.info

Dona Nelson moved to New York City in 1967 to participate in the Whitney Independent Study Program. She received her B.F.A. from Ohio State University in 1968. The subject of a mid-career survey at the Weatherspoon Museum of Fine Art, (Greensboro, NC), in 2000, her canvases are included in the public collections of the Weatherspoon Museum of Fine Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the M.I.T. Collection,  and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia, among others.  Nelson was awarded a 2011 Foundation for Contemporary Art Individual Grant. She was also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994, and a grant from the Tesuque Foundation in 2000, as well as other grants and awards. Dona Nelson is Professor of Painting and Drawing at Tyler School of Art, Temple University since 1991, and in 2011 was appointed Visiting Professor in Painting at Yale. www.donanelson.com

Siebren Versteeg was born in 1971 in New Haven, Connecticut. He has had solo exhibitions at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, Kansas; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; the Museum of Art at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Bellwether Gallery, New York; Ten in One Gallery, New York; and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. His work has been exhibited in group shows at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, Maryland; the Krannert Art Museum, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois; the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; and the National Museum of Art, Prague; among many others. Versteeg was a recipient of the Illinois Arts Council, Fellowship in 2005, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Merit Fellowship in 2004, and received the Stone Fellowship for Graduate Study from the University of Illinois, Chicago, where he received his Masters degree in 2004. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. www.siebrenversteeg.com

Leeza Meksin is an interdisciplinary artist, who makes paintings, installations, public art and multiples. She received a joint BA/MA in Comparative Literature and General Studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago (2000); a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005), and a MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art  (2007). Recipient of the Robert Schoelkopf Fellowship (2006) and the Open Society Soros Foundation Grant (2009), Meksin has exhibited her work at Regina Rex, NY (2011), Adds Donna, Chicago (2011), Cosign Projects, St. Louis (2011), Ohio State University Gallery (2012), The Lot @ Artspace, New Haven (2012), and many other venues. Born and raised in Moscow, Russia, Leeza immigrated to the United States in 1989, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. www.meksin.com