FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Andrew Rafacz
Keith Couser
312-421-6993
info@bucketridergallery.com
www.bucketridergallery.com
BUCKET RIDER GALLERY continues the spring season with new paintings by Sarah Cromarty and Amy Mayfield in the main exhibition space and new photographs by Greg Stimac in the project room.
Chicago, IL, April 28, 2006
Bucket Rider welcomes the new spring season with an exhibition of new painting by Sarah Cromarty and Amy Mayfield. Running concurrently in our project room is a photographic installation from Greg Stimac’s Recoil series. The show opens Friday, April 28th with an artist’s reception from 6 to 9pm, and continues through June 3rd.
L.A. based painter Sarah Cromarty received her BFA at Art Center College of Design. She has exhibited at sixspace and was most recently seen in Jim Shaw’s Army at the Rental Gallery, both in Los Angeles. Applying acts of defacement and recreation, Cromarty begins with a found painting and manipulates its form and content. Through such interventions the paintings displace traditional notions of figure/ground relationships as well as the authentic and the copy. By playing with these formal rules, Cromarty is akin to other contemporary painters such as Peter Doig, Michael Raedecker or Dexter Dalwood as she opens up a visual place in painting that calls in question the rules of an “imaginative space”. Equally influenced by the 19th century romantic painter Casper David Friedrich, whose sublime depictions of landscape are eerily cinematic by today’s standards. Her process can be summarized in a statement written by Gerhard Richter in a letter less than a generation ago: “A painting by Casper David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted.”
Amy Mayfield received her MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago and recently exhibited at Gallery 400 in Chicago. Her paintings evoke an imagined space, born out of a diaristic approach to the artist’s memory and experience. Mayfield exposes this interior landscape by allowing the form of the paintings to be an extension of their content. Often contrasting heavy, indulgent gobs of poured paint with delicate ink details that operate like ornamental filigree, she evokes a constantly shifting emotional tonality to her entire work.
Chicago-based photographer Greg Stimac exhibits new photographs from the Recoil series in our project room. Born in Ohio, Stimac received his BFA from Columbia College, and has traveled throughout the country to document the fragile (and often brutal) beauty of humanity, investigating the ways we organize and validate our lives. With Recoil, he examines the very American desire to own and operate firearms, as well as make them an extension of one’s personality and very being. Taking cues from the portraiture and documentary photographs of Catherine Opie, William Eggleston, and Joel Sternfeld and referencing the formal serialism of Ed Ruscha’s L.A. photographs of the sixties, Stimac details the people and situations on firing ranges throughout the United States. A substantial bandwidth of human behaviors, emotions, and levels of security and insecurity emerge from his project.