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Remedios Rapoport

EXHIBITIONS

The Gentle Revolution, 2010

STATEMENT

Nature, music, cultural heroes, and current events inspire my work. I like twisting together landscapes, lyrics, letterforms, Filete Porteño, and graphic elements of psychedelic art of the 60’s. Filete Porteño, a decorative painting style of Argentina, is one of my favorite visual tools. It works abstractly around the subject through use of color, shape, relationships, movement, and emotion. It also traditionally combines words, pictorials, icons and variations of colorful acanthus leaf scrolls. I find it very expressive and beautiful, with an old world feeling that I like wrapping around my ideas of now.

My recent work has become part of an ongoing project of having Gentle Revolution art exhibits in different communities, sharing healthy and sustainable ideas of change. These paintings, which often become painted wall sculptures, are hand-made from materials including wood, metal, found objects, paints, and gilding. With this work I hope to inspire people to create positive change that improves their lives and protects the earth. This exhibition, to be shown at Monarch Studio in April, 2009, will include art that is supportive of the ideas presented in my Gentle Revolution Manifesto.

BIO

Born in Oregon, Remedios Rapoport began her life as an artist with childhood summer visits to the art museums of Southern California. In high school she was selected to study printmaking in a National Endowment for the Arts and Oregon Arts Commission program. While continuing her arts education in college she began having solo exhibits of her work. In 1986 Rapoport enrolled to study painting and design at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. With travel in 1988 to Buenos Aires, Argentina she began a study of Filete Porteño from the masters there. Receiving her BFA degree in 1989 from PNCA, she continued her studies of filete and painting in Portland, Oregon and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Exhibiting in 1990 at the Museo de la Ciudad, Buenos Aires opened the doors for future exhibits and recognition for her work in Argentina and the USA. In 1995 she received a Technical Assistance Grant award from the Regional Arts and Culture Council of Portland, Oregon for her filete studies.
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Bailey Russel

EXHIBITIONS

The Unique View: Camera Obscura Photographs, 2010

STATEMENT

Working in the tradition of Vera Lutter and Abelardo Morell, Bailey Russel creates captivating photographs using various custom-made camera obscuras. These cameras range in size from a small box designed for 8”x10” sheet film holders, to hotel rooms that overlook a city scape. The final images offer us unique, contemporary perspectives of archetypal images.

BIO

Bailey began studying photography as an undergraduate at Princeton before continuing for a Masters at NYU. After spending six years working and showing in New York City he recently relocated to Seattle has begun exploring the possibilities of the Pacific Northwest. In New York, Bailey’s work has been featured in shows at the International Center for Photography, Gallery Satori, Sarah Bowen Gallery, and the Rosenberg Gallery among other places and his most recent solo show was at Gallery Cortona in Clinton, Iowa.

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Tatiana Garmendia

EXHIBITIONS

Epic, 2009

STATEMENT – EPIC SERIES

I work from the live model and from photographs of these sessions. The drawings in this presentation specifically probe notions of distances, great and small, as well as notions of open ground and narrow passes. The various figures (nearly always the same man) advance or retreat into the ground of the drawing as they materialize and dematerialize on the painted Mylar. They occupy and relinquish the shallow stage of the depicted battle variously, through their levels of opacity or translucency, through their entrances or exits. Like characters in an epic battle, the figures play their compulsory parts in an ever-unfolding topography of war.

BIO

Tatiana Garmendia’s work synthesizes formal concerns and a humanist engagement with history and culture. “History is not a subject I just picked up from a dusty schoolbook, but things I’ve actually lived. I remember playing in abandoned missile trenches as a child,” says the artist, who was born in Cuba during the height of the Cold War. Repatriation from the Spanish government took the artist’s family first to Madrid, and later to the U.S.A.

Garmendia’s classical training began at the American University in Paris. Travelling throughout Europe, she also learned from the works of the old masters. Returning stateside, she continued her formal education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Florida International University, where she earned a BFA in 1985. After college, the artist taught drawing and painting for five years. In 1990 Garmendia moved to New York to pursue graduate studies at the Pratt Institute of Art, Brooklyn. A college art conference brought the artist to Washington in 1993 and she fell in love with Seattle. A Cintas Fellowship the same year made it possible for her to move to the Emerald City, where she currently lives and teaches.

Garmendia has exhibited her work throughout the United States and abroad. She has exhibited at The Bronx Museum of Arts, Art In General, and Stux Gallery in New York. Among the European galleries where Garmendia has shown are The Milan Art Center in Italy, Castfield Gallery in England, and the Galeria Riesa Efau in Germany. Her works are in public collections in New York, Miami, Illinois, California, Ohio, and the Dominican Republic.

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EPIC Catalog

Arun Sharma

EXHIBITIONS

(de)composition, 2010
100 Flowers Campaign, 2010

STATEMENT

My sculpture and installation based artwork is an autobiographical extension of myself. By intuitively responding to different materials, processes, and concepts, I create artwork that reveals my true nature, my feelings and/or thoughts about an idea, or an experience I had. I try to elevate the viewer’s senses by drawing them into a world beyond the familiar, all the while presenting to them themes that they identify with.

Since the art work I make is my attempt to understand myself and my life, the work reveals my intrinsic desires, fears, anxieties, thoughts, etc. The most common themes that have emerged from the artwork I have made so far are birth, death, and the messy life in between. This messy life includes sexuality, reproduction, religion, my relationship with others, and an interest in culture.

BIO

Arun Sharma was born (1978) and raised in New York State. He attended The New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, graduating Cum Laude with a BFA in ceramics with a minor in Art History. During his studies at Alfred University, he took a year off to make a personal pilgrimage to India, and worked with a professional ceramist in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. After completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2001 he spent a year in New York City teaching ceramics at the 92nd Street Y and Chambers Street Pottery. In September 2002, he left the US to live and work in Japan. He spent over a year in Osaka, where he maintained a private studio and studied the Japanese aesthetic. In 2004, he relocated to Kyoto, where he was employed as a studio manager and ceramics instructor at Okiraku Ceramic School. He held a solo exhibition at Neutron Gallery in Kyoto titled ‘Is Purity Possible?’ While in Japan, he met and married his Australian wife, Le. In January 2005, Arun and Le, moved to Melbourne, Australia. He was employed at the Incinerator Arts Complex as their inaugural artist-in-resident from April 2005 to December 2006. Along with holding four solo shows at the Incinerator Arts Complex, Arun raised the profile of art in the Moonee Valley Community by running local art workshops for adults and children, collaborating with international visiting artists and participating in local art events. He was nominated by the community of Moonee Valley for the Spirit of Moonee Valley Award: in the Arts and Culture category. Arun was accepted into The University of Washington’s Master of Fine Arts program on a scholarship in 2007 and graduated in 2009.

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Liz Tran

EXHIBITIONS

Enfold, 2009

STATEMENT

Liz Tran’s newest series of work was completed during winter residencies in the frigid northeast. During her time away from home she ruminated about the meaning of comfort and warmth. These thoughts led her to encase her ongoing series of tree paintings in a vibrant winter wardrobe. Tran drew from sources such as the knitted tree cozies of Knitta, the painted branches of Salvation Mountain and the work of Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

BIO

Liz Tran grew up in Oregon’s Willamette Valley surrounded by trees, rivers and mountains. As a child she spent many hours playing on, in and around the tall evergreens in my neighborhood. These were her play structures and her escape. “What I see when I look out the window are trees. When I look to the sky I see branches. Even though I now live in the city of Seattle I often encounter more trees per day than people. These are my portraits.” A large variety of materials are used in her work, including Japanese paper, ink, acrylic, graphite, beeswax and carving and printmaking techniques.

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Sylwia Tur

EXHIBITIONS

Mapping, 2010

STATEMENT

My work explores an array of linguistic concepts. I am interested in relationships between familiar shapes and objects presented in a slightly unfamiliar way. Because basic geometric shapes are often devoid of inherent identity, thus providing a clean slate, I can choose their identity by the way I bring them together in one object or a series of objects. I am attracted to balance, not necessarily order, but the right balance achieved spatially between shapes. Similarly to the way language works and the choices we make with our speech, I use the vocabulary of shapes to create my own language of objects. The set of vocabulary I draw from is basically the same every time; what differs is the way I choose its orientation and connection toward one another.

One of the most important components of my work is the awareness of the internal structure of things. Perhaps this interest stems from the other area of my life that continues to be significant to me: linguistic research, where the underlying or hidden structure of language is what can give us clues as to what we see on the surface. When working on my sculptures, I always think about their internal structure, what the structure is and what it could be, since I am the one who assigns it. Because the internal structure can only be known to me, thus hidden from the viewer, I transfer and represent my idea of internal structure to the outside of a piece, to the surface of the form. I do this in such a way that each piece has several viewing points, one of them being the optimal viewing point and the others providing additional details. It is these details, which cannot always be seen from the optimal viewing point that I think of as the internal structure of my work. They are not visible at a first glance, but once they become known, they provide the viewer with a form of x-ray vision or a memory trace that completes the piece. It is at this point that both internal and external structures are known, one informing the other.

BIO

Sylwia Tur was born and raised in Poland. She received Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Linguistics from the University of Washington in Seattle, followed by Post-Baccalaureate studies in Studio Art (Ceramics) also at the UW. She continues to draw inspiration from both fields: art and linguistics. Her work has been included in several juried and invitational exhibitions throughout the country. She also had solo shows at the Ceramics Gallery of the University of Washington, at the Pottery Northwest Gallery in Seattle, and at the Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, WA. She is a recipient of the Artist Trust GAP Grant (Grants for Artist Projects), as well as the Regional Exhibition Award from the National Council of Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA). She lives and works in Seattle.

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Jojo Corväiá

THE HUMAN FACTOR PROJECT
MAY 28 – JUN 28, 2009

After making its inaugural debut in Miami in 2008, Monarch Studio is pleased to announce the opening of The Human Factor Project by multimedia artist Jojo Corväiá. The project consists on a series of interviews, portraits, pray recordings, and video recordings, of a group of seventy individuals of different background and ethnicity. Through this exhibition, Mr. Corväiá generously shares a personal revelation of human commonality, allowing us to better understand ourselves and each other.

Press Release 2009