FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Nancy Macko, Works on Paper
May 3 – June 14, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 3, 7-9pm
68 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, CA 90291
Director, Robin McCarthy
310-990-9914
E-mail, info@commissaryarts.com
Web site, http://www.commissaryarts.com
Gallery hours, Thursday & Friday 12-5pm; Saturday 12-6pm; and by appointment
Nancy Macko, “Conversations avec Oeillet: l'eau (Conversations Among the Eyelets: Water)”, 2003. Mixed media on mulberry paper, 22 x 27 inches.
HIVE MOMENTS: NANCY MACKO, WORKS ON PAPER
AT COMMISSARY ARTS, MAY 3 TO JUNE 14, 2008
VENICE, CA—Commissary Arts is pleased to announce Hive Moments opening Saturday, May 3. This exhibition features prints and mixed media works on paper by Los Angeles artist Nancy Macko.
For the last decade, Macko has drawn upon images from the honey bee society to explore the relationships between art, science, technology and ancient matriarchal cultures. Her work combines the analog elements of painting and printmaking with the digital elements of photography and video to create hybrid pieces that are often displayed as mixed media/digital installations.
For this exhibition, Macko presents two suites of recent etchings and lithographs, entitled In the Garden of the Bee Priestess and The First Ten Prime Numbers, and unique mixed media works on paper from the series Conversations. In these works, Macko employs what have become universal motifs in her work—the plumb bob (a weight with a pointed tip on the bottom used to determine verticality), and the page reinforcement. The ambiguous rotund shape of the plumb bob suggests the female form, while the circular page reinforcement becomes a collective structural symbol that clusters and floats through her compositions.
“The page reinforcement carries, of course, associations that are both utilitarian (homework in a loose-ring binder) and abstract (the cipher, the letter, the orb, the circle within the circle),” writes Patricia Albers in the curator’s statement to Macko’s 2005 exhibition Counterparts: Art From Mathematics, Peninsula Museum of Art, Belmont, California. “At the same time, its shape is—a second surprise—so profoundly satisfying as to evoke a line from poet Edna St. Vincent Millay: ‘Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.’ ”
Conversations avec Oeillet (eyelets): earth, air, fire, water, 2003, four of the unique mixed media works in the exhibition, use a color palette of vinyl decals in the form of the circular page reinforcement and handprinting. These works reference the visual dialog Macko observed among the fallen leaves on the footpath of the bois d’amour (forest of love) in Pont Aven, Brittany. This non-verbal dialog “speaks” visually at the same time expressing her awareness of feeling culturally isolated and verbally limited during a 4-month residency in France in 2003.
Macko, former Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Scripps College and currently chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, has been Director of the Scripps Digital Art Program since 1990. Originally from New York, she received her undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin, River Falls; MA and MFA in Studio Art from the University of California at Berkeley and an MA in Education from UC Berkeley. A practicing artist since 1981, she has had 20 solo exhibitions, participated in over 140 group shows and has received over 30 research and achievement awards for her work. Her works are in many public and private collections.
This is Macko’s first solo exhibition following her 2007 mid-career survey show, The Hive Universe: Nancy Macko, 1994-2006, at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park, Los Angeles.
A reception for the artist will be held on Saturday, May 3, 2008 from 7 to 9pm. The exhibition will be on view until June 14, 2008. Commissary Arts is a new gallery space in Venice presenting work by emerging and mid-career Southern California artists through a mix of solo and group exhibitions.
The gallery is located at 68 N. Venice Boulevard, Venice, CA 90291. Gallery hours are Thursday and Friday, 12-5pm, Saturdays 12-6pm, and by appointment. For additional information or to request visual material, please contact the gallery at (310) 990-9914, or email info@commissaryarts.com.
