For Immediate Release
Contact: Sandra Lee Gallery
251 Post Street, Suite 310,
Phone: (415) 291 – 8000
Email: art@sandraleegallery.com
Sandra Lee Gallery Presents: Exploration & Celebration Finale: Artist Talk
Featuring artists: Dong Phan, Wonju Shin, David Jang
Exhibition Date: November 1st – November 28th, 2009
Artist Talk
November 21st, 4:00pm – 6:00pm
www.sandraleegallery.com
On Saturday, November 21st the Sandra Lee Gallery will host, An Afternoon with the Artists, David Jang, Dong Phan, and Wonju Shin, featuring a champagne cocktail bar from 4:00 – 6:00 p.m. The artists are thoughtful and engaging speakers, excited to share the ideas informing their work and their personal approaches to the artistic process.
David Jang transforms the detritus of urban life into minimalist paintings of formal elegance – gritty, yet sublime – that echo the contemporary industrial landscape. Jang deconstructs repurposed materials – plywood, aluminum cans, scrap metal – painting with a grinder or blow torch, to reveal a surprising formal beauty hidden within the industrial process. The distressed surfaces of his paintings have the austere elegance and gritty patina of objects that have withstood the tests of time to reveal inner truths.
For Dong Phan the horse and it’s journey are a metaphor for the character arc of his own life story as a Vietnamese refugee, reflecting hardships endured through personal grace and inner strength. In his current series of equine self-portraits, the nobility and elegance of his horses are tinged with the accrued patina of memory. The complex layered surfaces of his paintings are “like a journey in time,” and when the final layer is completed he scratches down through the multiple layers of paint and encaustic to reveal in the underlying textures, the journey that is the artistic process.
Wonju Shin, employs minimalist markings in pencil to create light infused compositions that are contemplative, questioning, and spiritually charged. Shin’s compositions are energized by the opposition between the negative space of the blank paper and the artist’s deliberate mark. Portals, defined by the absence of artistic gesture, float in her evanescent fields of pencil markings, pulling the eye towards a realm of pure white light that threatens to transcend the objective reality of the composition altogether - as if the blank unmarked paper were asserting its priority to the artist’s field of marks.
We cordially invite you to raise a glass of bubbly Kir Royale with David Jang, Dong Phan, and Wonju Shin. Join us for an opportunity to meet the artists, exchange ideas in an informal setting, and come away with a deeper understanding of their fresh and innovative work.
###