EXPLOSIVE COMPULSIVE

EXPLOSIVE COMPULSIVE

new work by

REED ANDERSON (NY)

JEN LIU (NY)

ADRIANE COLBURN (SF)

three artists who map and explore consciousness, the built environment and the natural world.

see SF Weekly

SF Chronicle

SF Station

Art Business

ArtWeek (February 2006) review by Colin Berry

REED ANDERSON

Anderson draws highly ornate constellations of flora and fauna by folding large pieces of paper into sections, cutting holes into the paper and then applying different layers of color. The drawings are visual palindromes, mirroring positive, negative and dimensional space. Lacy shadows created by the holes emphasize the physicality of the paper while images of crystals collaged onto the surface suggest a metaphysical space filled with portals, time warps and trap doors. Images of bears, deer, beavers, lush flowers and intricate foliage are taken from everyday sources.

Anderson will show two large circular works on paper with some smaller studies..These pieces continue Andersons exploration using botanic flora and fauna to create an air of animism or hypnotic transcendence.

Reed Anderson received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1993) and was awarded a residency
at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine (1994). He has had solo exhibitions at Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY; Clementine Gallery, New York; Mixture Contemporary, Houston, TX; and at Lump Gallery, Raleigh, NC. His work has been included in group exhibitions at, among others, Post Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, New York, NY; and at the Carnegie Mellon University Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA. Anderson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

ADRIANE COLBURN

For the past several years, Colburn has been working on a series of installations and maps that seek to organize and chart changes in the natural and urban landscape.These constructions, made of layers of hand cut paper often shed light on systems that exist below or those that are shielded by its exterior.

Colburn maps out these inaccessible places, by systemizinginformation, (often based on landscapes or history) to create an abstraction that can be both informative and/or ambiguous.

Colburns work is inspired by a long standing interest in history and invisible worlds; and the retelling of history as filtered through human bias.

The act of ordering these legacies by way of a chart or image is both an attempt to make sense of the tangle that is the world we live in and an investigation into that which we truly cannot know.

ADRIANE COLBURN received her MFA from Stanford University and her BFA from The School of the Art Institute ofChicago. Her workhas been presented at Gallery 16, New Langton Arts, The Luggage Store Gallery,Southern Exposure, San Francisco Arts Commisson, San Francisco;and at The Stanford Art Gallery, Stanford CA.

JEN LIU Liu examine culture and politics through a patchwork of pop models – music, icons, narrative tropes, digital and print graphics.What results are imaginary worlds in which aspects of the real world are intensified through allegory, and hidden motivations are revealed through mass media aesthetics.

Starting with an ideal based in reality, Liudevelops fictional narratives that bring these premises to their logical extremes.The premises sound great: universal peace, the future as a beer-drinking utopia, new international holidays, rediscovered spirituality.However, realized through familiar laws of power and abuse, they turn out to be quite nasty.What results is work that seems pop and pleasurable; but after a moment reveals an all-too familiar, dark world.

JEN LIU received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2001, and holds a BA in Creative Writing from Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio
(1998).Recently a resident at De Ateliers, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Liu has also been invited to residencies at Grizedale Arts, Grizedale, England (2005) and Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany (2006). She has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include The Last Four Seasons, Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Ready To Die! Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Los Angeles; Friends Electric! Jen Liu, Andrea Thal, Binz39 Foundation, Zurich, Switzerland; Fast Forward: A Passion for the New, House of Campari, Venice, CA (in affiliation with The Museum of Contemporary Art); 100 Artists See God, Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Videonale, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany; Open Video Call, Artists Space, New York, NY; and An Interest in Life, Apex Art, New York, NY.