WEBS AND ROADS: DRAGANA CRNJAK, COMPLEMENT OF CLOSURE: FIONA ROSS, AND PARTITA: ROBERT WALZ AT PAGE BOND GALLERY, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3 , 2014.
The Page Bond Gallery is pleased to present Web and Roads: Dragana Crnjak, Complement of Closure: Fiona Ross, and Partita: Robert Walz. The Exhibition will be on view October 3 through October 31, 2014. A reception for the artists will take place Friday, October 3, 2014 from 7 to 9 PM.
The abstract works of Bosnian-born artist Dragana Crnjak often begin with a defined sense of place. Her charcoal and acrylic works show restrained use of color, deep contrast, and fragmented, abstract shapes that seem to be in a state of flux. Her newest series is inspired by the concept of the web. “I am interested in the web as both an image, a metaphor, and its development through the drawing and painting process. The ideas of interconnectedness, growth, stability and fragility that the images of webs project fascinates me,” Crnjak writes. These inherent tensions in the properties of a web seem to infuse her paintings, which show both delicacy and substance. Composed through a combination of chance and thoughtful manipulation of materials, her images of webs seem to be anchored in space like constellations viewed through a hazy lens. They are a powerful symbol of the interconnectedness of the natural and technological world.
Fiona Ross is known for her intricate, optically stunning works on paper. Her newest paintings are a continuation of her series of acrylic paintings on yupa. These works take advantage of the unique translucence of the paper and it’s relative impermeability, which allows the pigments to travel and merge on its surface before drying. In this way, Ross’ paintings celebrate the natural behavior of her materials, and each work combines intentional markings with the dramatic visual effects of evaporation and gravity. This deliberate openness to chance brings a playfulness to the works, while the complexity and modular nature of the designs suggests a mathematical precision and the unique beauty of scientific observation. Some paintings are layered to create the illusion of three-dimensionality, or painted on the back to intensify colors. Her complex abstract shapes seem to float in a quiet, timeless space, with their own laws of order, stability and balance.
Robert Walz’ fondness of photography and its inherent mysteries began many years ago when he discovered his Grandfather’s Rolleiflex which still had a roll of exposed film inside, undeveloped. As a journalist, his grandfather used this camera to support his words, much like a room with a view supports a poet. A camera offered him more than just an objective tool to document a given event. It provided, thanks to the wonders of modern chemistry, the ability to study the infinite details within an image.
Walz says of his work, “In these details, an entirely new story develops, part fiction, part not. There’s a mystery in the recording of a moment, of time passing, of people and place in the midst of change. A photograph allows us to be two places at once, one which we are always leaving and yet always arriving. A place at once familiar and mysterious. It’s a narrative of heightened reality, under the pretense of stasis.
A photograph is like a geologist’s core sample. The objective is to not only uncover data, but to discover the story of time and place and in the process, expose a bit of the mystery of us as well–what we choose to see, touch, hear, and hold all help create this story, if only too briefly, like a poem.”
