"Still Lifes, Landscapes, and Posers" Press Release

Saturday Feb 23, 6-9 pm.
threesquared
427 Chestnut St.
Nashville, TN

clockwise: Gregory Martin, Steven LaRose, Cole Case, Mary Addison Hackett, Carla, Knopp, Nomi Lubin 

In "Still Lifes, Landscapes, and Posers", artist and guest curator, Mary Addison Hackett brings together six painters from across the country whose use of deceptively simple subject matter reveals itself to be more complex than it first appears. Her relationship to each of these painters is based on a dialogue of shared sensibilities and a respect for the process of painting and depth that each artist brings to the table.

For COLE Case (Los Angeles), landscape, water, and flowers provide a perfect mirror for the human psyche and for hundreds of years have served to reflect our obsession with beauty, mortality, brevity or fear. Case begins his process by creating small ballpoint pen and wash drawings on site. Intuitively traveling to locations throughout Southern California, Case has found the extraordinary in the familiar: cement river beds, high desert landscape, or sunflowers arranged in left over plastic water bottles. Different from the Impressionists and California Plein Air painters who made their paintings on site, Case later incorporates iPhone and iPad app technology to isolate and match specific color elements before transforming the drawings into large paintings. 
In addition to solo shows at Western Project in Los Angeles, Cole was recently included in The Painted Desert at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History, curated by Andi Campognone, and Underground Pop at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, curated by critic, David Pagel. He has shown at Howard House (Seattle, Washington); University of California Irvine, (Irvine, California); and the Luckman Gallery at California State University, (Los Angeles), among other venues. He received a BA in English Literature from Stanford University and a BFA in Fine Art from the Art Center College of Design. 

MARY ADDISON Hackett (Nashville) varies her approach to painting by constructing a visual language from fragments of stored information, as well as working perceptually from direct observation. Her self-portraits and still lifes are part of a larger body of work documenting day-to -day life and the improbable task of capturing everything that filters through it. Referencing sources ranging from Camus’s doctor in The Plague, to a footnote written by19th century art critic, John Ruskin, Hackett uses the language of painting to address the ever-shifting construction of meaning, memory, and representation.
Mary Addison was a Los Angeles based painter before returning to Nashville for an extended residency in 2010. She was recently included in About Face, curated by Daniel Weinberg at ACME. in Los Angeles, and To Live and Paint in LA at the Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, California, curated by Max Presneill. Solo and group exhibitions include Kristi Engle Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); John Davis Gallery (Hudson, NY); Weekend (Los Angeles, CA); SUGAR (Brooklyn, NY); and the Amelia Museum of Archeology, (Umbria, Italy), among others. She holds an MFA from The University of Illinois at Chicago and a BFA from The University of Tennessee. She publishes the art blog, Process, and currently teaches part-time at Watkins College of Art, Design and Film. 

CARLA Knopp (Indianapolis, IN) describes her painting practice as exploratory. She seeks artistic revelation from both personal expressionism and from formal experimentation. These two impulses guide her investigations, and form a body of work which ranges from mystical realism to abstraction. Knopp’s Lane Marker series are loosely constructed on the subjective and pictorial theme of marked territories. By using the qualities inherent in metallic paint to create a visual conundrum both literally and metaphorically, Knopp creates optically challenging landscapes that can be read as both an invitation or a warning. 
Carla holds a BFA from Herron School of Art, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. She has worked as a studio artist for 25 years, showing her work in both juried and invitational exhibitions including the Harrison Gallery, Indianapolis; Russell/Projects in Richmond, VA; Silas Marder Gallery, Bridgehampton, NY; and Sugar, Bushwick, NY. She runs Dewclaw, an artist run space in Indianapolis and hosts a blog called Rocktown, Indiana.

STEVEN LaRose (Talent, OR) traces his complicated relationship with the human figure and representation back to an early interest in comics. While LaRose’s main body of work veers toward the abstract and amorphous, a successful Kickstarter campaign allows him to host a weekly drawing and painting session, free for the public, in his studio with a nude model. In turn, these sessions spent with the figure serve as a source for his subsequent abstraction. 
Steven received his MFA from the Claremont Graduate University, and his BFA from Whitman College. He has had solo exhibitions in Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Ashland, Oregon. His work has been discussed in the Los Angeles Times, ARTnews, The New Art Examiner, and The Chicago Tribune. In addition to teaching at Southern Oregon University and Rogue Community College in Oregon, he offers free figure drawing sessions to the community through his project, AnyOne Can Draw. 

NOMI Lubin (New Haven, CT) uses the personal and familiar to document a scene which reveals subtle nuances upon each viewing. Asking more questions than they answer, her paintings made from looking out the window of her childhood bedroom allow the viewer to shift focus between the interior and the exterior in a kind of figure-ground paradox. By imposing both structure and boundary where she sets about to create each window paintings in one session, she strives to translate a temporal experience.
Nomi has shown at Verge Art Brooklyn, Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, Winonna State University in Minnosota, and the Bowery Gallery in New York among others. She completed her studies in painting at The New York Studio School and holds a BA in English from Southern Connecticut University. 

GREGORY Martin (Starkville, MS) is a California native whose work explores the relationship between human ideals and practice. Citing growth and decay, the illusion of depth and flatness, the “truth” of photography along with the “fiction” of painting, Martin’s landscapes become contemplative spaces in which to experience dualities and polarities within human nature, the natural world and the practice of painting.
Gregory studied visual art at CSU Long Beach and Claremont Graduate University where he received his MFA in Painting in 2002. Solo and group exhibitions include the Museum of Art & History, (Lancaster, CA); Electric Lodge, (Venice, CA); George Billis Gallery, (Culver City, CA); Ruth Bachofner Gallery, (Santa Monica, CA), and most recently, McComas Gallery at Mississippi State University where he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art. 

The opening party will be held Saturday, February 23rd from 6 to 9 pm. Wine and light refreshments will be served. Parking is free.