Jae Ko - 流 Flow
Ted Larsen - Insider Influence, The Space Program And Other Specified Domains
Derrick Velasquez - Constant Denial
RADIAL: Kate Petley, Don Voisine, and Stephen Westfall
Press Release:

Jae Ko • Ted Larsen • Derrick Velasquez

RADIAL: Kate Petley • Don Voisine • Stephen Westfall

July 20 – September 9, 2017

Robischon Gallery is pleased to feature a four-part presentation consisting of three individual solo exhibitions by artists Jae Ko (D.C.), Ted Larsen (NM) and Derrick Velasquez (CO), alongside, “RADIAL,” a select group show of three artists, Kate Petley (CO), Don Voisine (NY) and Stephen Westfall (NY). Each of the artists presented utilize the vehicle of abstraction to explore their individual and varied approach toward geometric and curvilinear forms – while sharing a strong sense of materiality and an investigation of spatial relationships via a sculptural or painterly stance. Both formal and conceptual pursuits are revealed by the artists through process and a range of unexpected media which includes adding machine paper, salvaged automotive metals and decorative architectural moldings.

Jae Ko
流
(“Flow”)

Robischon Gallery is very pleased to present Jae Ko’s “Flow,” the artist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery featuring distinctive individual wall sculptures, along with Ko’s second site-specific paper installation.
As part of Ko’s “Force of Nature” installation series and as a continuation of her recent exhibition at Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Flow elaborates on Ko’s signature and unconventional use of paper as her material of choice. With large spools of commercial adding machine tape which are unfurled and re-rolled into soft, pliant coils, the artist painstakingly stacks and layers the paper, up walls and over floors in relationship to each varied architectural space. Ko’s installations have previously scaled vast museum walls, rounded corners and descended stairwells in such other noteworthy art spaces as the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey. In an all-white gallery, Flow takes its shape via piece by coiled piece resulting in a silken white-on-white undulating form with moiré effect. Responsive to the malleability of the paper, Ko states, “Sometimes I place a roll on the floor, and give it a tap right in the middle. They just collapse then fold into amazing shapes. I want people to see the work and to think how this ordinary material can be more than what they think because paper transforms into a unifying, potentially infinite continuation, and in process, relates to a kind of poetic space that performs around the human body. My work continues to evolve as a conceptual practice – the transformation of everyday objects into something extraordinary for new visual and sensual experiences.”
An important aspect of Ko’s ongoing investigation is sparked by a sense of place. Just as in parallel series, the compelling curvilinear lines of Ko’s individual twisted, smooth-spun paper, ink and glue sculptures were inspired by Nature, as in the wind-whipped, ancient bristlecone pines of California’s White Mountains. Similarly, Flow is the artist’s response to the rapidly disappearing snowy and glacial topographies throughout the northwestern US. Ko’s travels to the American West, including the dramatic landscapes of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico followed by Newfoundland, Labrador and eastern Canada, inspired her shift into exploring installation as a way to capture the panoramic geographies of diverse landscapes. This same creative curiosity for over two and a half decades, has led the artist to a mastery of her medium. Ko pushes the material to not only address a kind of cultural history, but with further intent, speaks to ancient landscape formations and vanishing tundra environments. With sweeping forms and lavender-tinged color, Flow’s mounds of paper respond to shifting light and shadow capturing a sense of wonder in alignment with the northern landscape Ko suggests.
Ko’s potent, individual shaped sculptures of paper, ink and glue are equally engaging works with their rich, matte, ink-soaked surfaces. Made with her highly-recognized and ingenuous proprietary process, the ongoing essential and far-reaching series continues to intrigue both the artist and viewer. Known for her monochromatic palettes, the velvety-looking surfaces of black Sumi ink dominated by an electric ultramarine blue (a kind ice-reflecting-sky hue), is an ethereal new shade for Ko, reaffirming the artist’s ever-evolving pursuit of her vision. Creating a dynamic and unique language, Ko’s ongoing achievement in technical and thematic resonance establishes the artist as not only noteworthy, but as having mastered a brilliant relationship between idea and medium. With the addition of her remarkable installation series, Jae Ko continues to distinguish herself as a pioneer of material abstraction and as an artist with an expansive view of the world around.
Born in Korea, and educated in Japan, the Washington, D.C.-based Jae Ko is recipient of a prestigious Pollack-Krasner Foundation grant and a winner of the noteworthy 2012 Anonymous Was a Woman award. The artist studied at Toyo Art School, Tokyo, has a B.F.A. from Wako University, Tokyo, Japan and an M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has received grants and awards from Maryland State Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts and numerous DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Her work is in the permanent collections of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C., the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., Washington D.C. Convention Center and Grounds for Sculpture, New Jersey and others. Jae Ko has exhibited throughout the US and internationally in Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Canada and her work is currently on view at Paper Biennial, CODA Museum, Netherlands through October.

“RADIAL”
Kate Petley

Kate Petley’s conceptual process begins with collage and ends with the artist’s painterly hand while employing the camera as the essential vehicle for her abstraction. Petley’s experience of location, where the urban environment edges up against the natural world, serves as the point of departure for her work. From this inspiration, she creates a digitally-collaged unique print which is then further transformed with overlapping and often translucent layers of bold pigments. Having become accustomed to using theatrical film transparencies sealed in resin which is then laid visible every mark made by the artist, Petley’s work continues to refine the unconventional materiality of transparent layers to invoke space. The artist reflects, “My current work is marked by luminous color with contrasting rough edges. This shift demonstrates my process-driven sense of materiality and allows for Illusion, light, color and form to combine in reference to physical and psychological space. It is conceptually important to me that these images are initiated entirely in-camera without computer intervention.” Petley’s collage process references natural forms and architectural constructs to form a fragmented perceptual landscape joined and made tangible through steps that opens up the possibility of a visually-experiential sense of conceived place. The artist states, “The push-pull between the illusion of visual depth and the physically flat reality of the paintings compels me. A screen-like appearance prevails. There is an awkward tension, a sense of familiarity, and an odd balance in the compositions. I’m looking for a particular rhythm, a clumsy formality that seems almost tender. Moving towards sensation, subject matter is pushed out and an experiential sense of space fills the gap left behind. I am determined to pull a non-existing image out of thin air using a vocabulary that is not about language and by complicating the relationship of foreground to background, alluding to a distinct presence, my own experiences are inserted.”
Kate Petley has a BFA Cum Laude from University of Utah. Recently included in Metropolitan State University’s Center for Visual Art important exhibition entitled “Colorado Women in Abstraction” which coincided with Denver Art Museum’s groundbreaking “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” she has also shown at Nicolaysen Museum of Art Caspser, WY, The Harwood Museum, Taos, NM with additional work shown at University of Denver, Curfman Gallery, Colorado State University Gallery and others. Petley has been the recipient of numerous awards including: a How to Flatten a Mountain Residency, Wexford County, Ireland, a Ucross Foundation Fellowship, Sheridan ,WY, Peripheral Vision Publication Fellowship, Dallas, TX, Monoprint Series, Manneken Press, Bloomington IL, Invitational Artist Residency, Franz Mayer of Munich Glass, Munich, Germany, Monoprint Series, Manneken Press, Bloomington IL, Artist Residency and Teaching Intensive, Platte Forum, Denver CO, The Big Show, Second Place Award, Lawndale Art Center, Houston TX, Special Opportunity Grant, Texas Accountants and Lawyers for the Arts, Cultural Arts Council of Houston/Harris County. Texas Visual Arts Alliance Ninth Annual Exhibition, First Place Award, New Forms Regional Grant Initiative (NFRIG), National Endowment for the Arts and The Rockefeller Foundation. Her work is included in the collections of: The Nicolaysen Museum, Casper WY, The Federal Reserve Bank, Kansas City MO, Polsinelli LLC, Dallas TX, Chicago IL, and Denver CO, Houston Airport System, TX, Suntrust Bank, Atlanta GA, Intercontinental Exchange, Atlanta GA, Osage Art Consultancy, Hong Kong, Fidelity Investments, Denver CO and Boston MA, UCLA Hospital Santa Monica CA, Denver Children’s Hospital, Denver CO, The City of Houston, The Town of Vail, Vail CO, The Ritz Carlton, Hyatt, Marriott, and Caesar’s Palace Hotel Corporations, Park South Hotel, New York NY, Propriety Capital, Denver CO, Morgan Stanley, San Francisco CA and Vail Industries, Chicago IL.

Stephen Westfall

With an evident hand in contrast to the straight edges of color, Stephen Westfall pursues compositions that move back and forth between whole and fragment while utilizing bold geometric form and unexpected color. Following a solo exhibition at Robischon Gallery that featured a vivid fifty-foot, site-specific wall painting entitled Canterbury, Westfall returns to present additional intuition-driven paintings with hard-edged, but hand-painted configurations on canvas. The artist states, “A predominant number of my paintings since 2001 have ten or eleven colors in evolving geometric arrangements that invoke Post War “Hard Edge” painting, Navajo and Plains Indian patterns, the designs of Charles and Ray Eames, Pennsylvania Dutch Hex signs, harlequin patterns, and so on. I use geometric structures to distribute my colors in an imitation of randomness. I say “imitation” because truly random distribution would present a lot more clumping of value and chromatic temperature than I want. I’m searching for a sense of aeration and glow, like sunlight on a laundry line or a sun baked billboard on the eastern Arizona stretch of I-40. I’m also hoping that the color distribution will contest in some way the symmetry of my pictorial architectures. Along with dyslexia I have synesthesia and mixed dominance. I can taste and gather scents from certain colors, and numbers and consonants have colors (which proceed to have and scent and so on). I also do some things left handed and other things right handed since I desire symmetry but can’t live with it. So the shifting spread of my colors “undoes” my symmetries with an insider’s patience. I do not use tape on my canvases (impossible not to use tape on the wall paintings) so they have an increased “hand-made” feel to them in comparison with most Hard Edged painting. I think there’s a subtle animation as the paint meets the paint along the borders of every shape, a little vibration that also slows down the pattern reading – all the better for viewers to find the spaces of their own imagination.”
Stephen Westfall has both a BA and MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work is included in museum and corporate collections including: Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD Bon Marche, Paris, France Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO, The Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark Mason Gross Performing Arts Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, Microsoft, Seattle, WA, Munson Williams Proctor Institute, Utica, NY, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA , Museum of Modern Art, NY, The New York Public Library, NY, Rubin Museum, New York, NY , UBS Art Collection University Art Museum, University of California at Santa Barbara, CA and Whitney Museum, New York, NY, among others. Widely exhibited both in the US and abroad, Westfall has received numerous honors and awards such as the Rome Prize Fellowship, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Nancy Graves Foundation Grant, Class of 1932 Fellow of the Council of Humanities, Princeton University, Academy Award in Painting, American Academy of Arts & Letters, three National Endowment for the Arts awards and two from the New York State Council on the Arts.

Don Voisine

Don Voisine’s signature hard-edged geometric abstractions are equal parts mathematical precision and fine directional brushwork evident of the artist’s hand. From his earliest inspiration for his ongoing series, Voisine recalled an intimate response to floor plans of the physical spaces of dwellings. This prompted the investigation of what Voisine calls, “the language of space.” No longer referencing earlier specific sites, Voisine’s geometries maintain their seduction; a siren song that beckons intimate inspection of the painted surfaces; pondering how the illusion of one of his central, dark obsidian elements morphs out of perceptual view and back again through the considered application of glossy or matte paint. The puzzling shift of illusion can be read in a myriad of ways, as motion or as an apt metaphor in an age of falseness and fakery, or more directly as a formally elegant presentation where possibility and interpretation abound. The artist states, “The paintings are made in a very straight forward manner, no tricks, no flourishes and no fancy mediums. Both display some evidence of the hand within the structure of the grid. The paintings are made by simply overlaying or abutting planes or bands, generally combining no more than four or five elements. Although tape is used to mask off areas, my paintings are obviously hand painted and also gain some visual buzz from its imperfections.”
Hyperallergic’s John Yu writes of Voisine’s work: “Every color in a Voisine painting has its own material identity. Even the narrow bands edging or running through the panel’s border colors convey a distinctive feel to their physicality. The shifts between the sectioned areas can be tonal or sharp, but the vocabulary is solidly geometric: trapezoids, parallelograms, triangles, rectangles, and squares. The angled planes add a torque to the compositions. It is as if everything is held in a state of suspension, with the actions of falling, slipping, and sliding implied - his geometry is one that is under constant pressure, where gravity becomes a felt presence on the diagonal alignment of the planes. The pressure runs along the seams where adjoining sections meet; it varies in strength, but is never absent among the composition’s tightly wedged planes, both small and large – tensions between the spatial and the planar, color contrasts and tonal shifts, palpable forms and hinted-at spaces, often all in the same painting” ultimately creating abstractly-formal objects of contemplation and wonder.
Don Voisine attended the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine and the Rochester Institute of Technology. His work is in numerous permanent collections including: Art in Embassies Program, United States Department of State, Washington, DC, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, National Academy Museum, New York, NY, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Missoula Art Museum, Missoula, MT, New York Public Library, NY, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Special Collection of the Library, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, Neuberger Berman, New York, NY, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Mem Permanent Collection, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX and Joel and Lila Harnett Print Study Center, University of Richmond Museum, Richmond, VA. He was the recipient of the 2011 Purchase Prize, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Purchase Fund Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, 2008 Henry Ward Ranger Fund Purchase Award, National Academy Museum, New York and a 2006 Artist’s Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts, among others.

Ted Larsen
“Insider Influence, the Space Program and Other Specified Domains”

Robischon Gallery is pleased to present “Insider Influence, the Space Program and Other Specified Domains,” Ted Larsen’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. With his typically inventive approach and impeccably precise handling of atypical art materials, such as scrap metal from junked cars and boats, Larsen’s engagement of form addresses space with committed ingenuity in both large and especially small-scale works in this exhibition. Each element from the meticulously sheared metals, annealed wire and exposed plywood support structures, play in concert with Larsen’s humorous titles. Similar to the assembled nature of his materials, a linguistic amalgamation of words take shape as the titles in antonymous pairings like Plastic Glass, Daily Special, Linear Curve or the more somber War Games, circle back to Larsen’s thought-provoking exhibition title. The sun-faded, scratched and abraded surfaces of Larsen’s chosen materials along with the artist’s hand, take the form of delicate linear mark-marking. The range of unexpected sculptural shapes assembled with multiple layers of cut steel, are chromatically compelling as they invite examination of Larsen’s uniquely stratified and varied vocabularies. Animated shadows further enliven the dynamic viewing experience from the largest lattice sculpture to the most intimate-sized, densely layered work in the series.
Intellectually, there is full engagement as well, as the artist questions through form and manner, the accepted tenets of such art movements as Geometric Abstraction, Minimalism, Op Art or Constructivism. While Larsen’s work is located between the abstract and reductive, the artist clearly elucidates the complex relationship surrounding the function of art by saying, “We live a world of influence, where place matters and where everything is highly programmed. We live in a world where standards are not relevant; where what matters is celebrity status. We live a world where science doesn’t matter. Where science is fiction, fiction is truth and truth exists only as long as it is convenient. We live in a world of questionable relevance where what doesn’t matter does and what does matter doesn’t. Lucky for us, art doesn’t pay attention to these rules or conditions. It operates outside of limits, standards and territories. It doesn’t care about what we care about. It serves, but is only of service when it is convenient for itself. Art does this because it transcends the moment, the people, the culture, the hierarchy. Art is a lens, a condenser, a spreader, a pry bar. It opens. It shines. It illuminates. It doesn’t need us. We need it. And that is the rub. We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are. Art shows us who we are.” At once insightful and disarming, the unexpected visual vocabulary of Ted Larsen’s work encourages studious contemplation while allowing for joy to unfold.
Ted Larsen graduated magna cum laude from Northern Arizona University. A recipient of the prestigious Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant Award, the Artist Stipend Award, Wichita Falls Art Council, Texas, Surdna Foundation Education Travel Grant, New York, United States Representative to the Asilah Arts Festival, Morroco Representative and the Edward Albee Foundation Residency Fellowship. His work has been exhibited in solo shows at New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM, Amarillo Museum of Art, TX, along with exhibitions at art centers and gallery venues across the US. Larsen’s work is in the collections of the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, The Edward F. Albee Foundation, Proctor & Gamble, Fidelity Investments, National Broadcasting Company, The Bolivian Consulate, Reader’s Digest, PepsiCo, The University of Miami, Krasel Art Center, Dreyfus Funds, JP Morgan Chase, Forbes and Pioneer Hi-Bred, Inc. among many others. Larsen’s work will be in an exhibition at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art later in 2017.

Derrick Velasquez
“Constant Denial”

In tandem with his first solo exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, entitled “Obstructed View,” Robischon Gallery is pleased to present Derrick Velasquez’s “Constant Denial,” the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. Continuing on recent themes relating to both exhibitions, Velasquez and MCA Denver Associate Curator Zoe Larkins, convey that Velasquez’s sculpture is purposely placed in conversation with architecture. Larkins states, “Specifically, the works on view address MCA Denver’s David Adjaye building, as well as the politics of urban development and architecture more broadly. Velasquez highlights parts of the museum that are often overlooked,” such as the interior atrium between floors, “while transforming ordinary architectural features into art objects. Velasquez’s depiction and use of mass-produced building materials at once parody bourgeois aesthetics and challenge distinctions between architecture, art, and design.”
Provocatively considering how architectural elements shape the cultural discourse, Velasquez’s unconventional use of visually traditional decorative moldings like egg-and-dart or Greek key patterns, with their weighted meanings in both the cornice-like, impressive stacked gold molding of XXXXXXXXXXXL at MCA and the individual sculptures at Robischon are made pointedly political and contemporary. Through the unexpected use of molded foam joined with neatly planed wood forms into exaggerated crenellations or secreted interior linings, the “Preservation of Monument” series expands the discourse of how architecture and design covertly, even if without acknowledging it, reinforce the social status quo.
Velasquez notes, “The foam-trim molding has become an exploratory material that I have begun to use to draw in space. The architectural molding contemporarily represents faux opulence as it is made of cheap expandable foam that is easily manufactured for ubiquitous McMansions. It treats a surface through linear ornamentation and gives it value and weight. This façade, however, is flimsy and the perpetuated social and class/economic issues backing the crown molding begin to fall apart when exposed solely as an object. In the “Preservation of Monument” series I laminate this fake molding to finer hard woods or high-end facsimiles and paint it colors not normally seen on crown or trim molding, bubble-gum pink, peachy orange and pale blue. By using this combination as a material to make line and shape and color, I deny the typical uses of ornamentation and make it into an object that holds the history of elaborately ornamented places like Versailles with a Modernist and formal reconstruction.” The constant denial of the exhibition title is multifaceted and is offered as a point of discussion. In service of dialogue, Derrick Velasquez negates cultural objects from their desired and understood contexts even as he imbues the very same commodities with new and unexpected depths of significance.
Derrick Velasquez has a BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA from Ohio State University. He has exhibited in both solo and group museum exhibitions including Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM, and numerous university galleries including the Frame Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University, PA, Hiestand Gallery, Miami University, Myhren Gallery, University of Denver, Curfman Gallery, Colorado State University, Hopkins Hall Gallery, Ohio State University along with Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum. His awards and residencies include: William and Dorothy Yeck Young Sculptors Competition Purchase Award, Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum Artist Fellow, Colorado Creative Industries Career Advancement Award, Vertigo Art Space Artist Residency (as Stapleford Collective), Denver, CO, Redline Artist Residency - Denver, CO 2010-2012 Juror's Pick: Tricia Robson - Icebreaker 2.0, Ice Cube Gallery, Denver, CO 2011, Best In Show - Boxcar Gallery Annual Juried Show and Fergus Family Material Award - The Ohio State University 2008. His work is in select private and corporate collections such as Fidelity Investments, Miami University, Oxford, OH, Dikeou Collection, Denver, CO and the Colorado Convention Center. Velasquez is a founding member of Tank Studios, Tilt West and teaches at Metropolitan State College, Denver. “Obstructed View” runs through August 27, 2017 at MCA Denver and his organization of Open Shelf Library: The Stacks space is also on view.