Don Fritz
Jen Porreca
August 8, 2009 – September 5, 2009
Reception for the artists: Saturday, August 8, 7- 10 pm
BILLY SHIRE FINE ARTS
5790 Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
phone: 323-297-0600
fax: 323-297-0601
www.billyshirefinearts.com
info@billyshirefinearts.com
On-line press release with images:
www.leejosephpublicity.com/show/bsfaaug09
Cathie Bleck "Inspired by Nature"
Cathie Bleck
“When I was a girl I fell in love with darkness. The tools I work with became natural choices for someone drawn to observe and record the world in close detail, and to best orchestrate the balance between opposing forces: light, dark, intimate, huge, static, moving…”
Cathie Bleck’s art explores scale, surface and subject matter in a passionate form of storytelling built from light & dark rhythms. Her work employs inks, kaolin and 22K gold leaf on board, and in this show, she’ll be incorporating papyrus. “This is my first experiment with kaolin on papyrus. I picked up some papyrus while traveling in Cairo last year. It is extremely durable and the surface quality is very smooth,” states Bleck. In her August show at Billy Shire Fine Arts, Bleck shows how nature and myth are intertwined, illuminating, feeding and informing each other across culture and time.
www.cathiebleck.com
Lou Zona – Director, the Butler Institute of American Art.
Don Fritz "The Sky Is Falling"
Don Fritz “Deja Vu”
The works of mixed-media artist and ceramic artist Don Fritz have evolved from an early interest in Pop Art and icons of American pop culture expressed through popular imagery and cultural artifacts. In this show, Fritz explores the loss of childhood and adolescent innocence in a culture manipulated by the politics of consumption and war, both literally and metaphorically. “Childhood, as a concept, is a place charged with fantasies of freedom and innocence. It is addressed in my work by appropriating familiar imagery and reconstructing it on a flat surface in a self-reflexive and highly material approach. By layering and erasing visual elements and texts, I present conflicting ideas, developed via my psychological process. In reworking the surface, each layer brings me further into the dialectics of the issues being addressed. I incorporate images of toys and children performing gender roles in combination with ghost images of American pop culture. My goal is to show the disparity between our idealized fantasies and our physical-based realities” states Fritz. Currently, Fritz resides in Santa Cruz where he lectures on beginning, intermediate and advanced drawing; painting; 2-D mixed media, design basics; and ceramic sculpture at The University of California Santa Cruz.
www.donfritz.com
Jenn Porreca "Music Box"
Jenn Porreca "A Music Box for the Mini-Cinema"
The movies that are our lives will forever play out in history. This body of work by Jen Porreca plays on the delicate balance of the mystery of life and the reality of our own humanity. “In our own struggles to survive and to enjoy all that life has to offer us, we can often times forget to listen for the faint sounds of music in the mini-cinemas of our lives” states Porreca. “A Music Box for the Mini-Cinema” is presented in mixed media on panel and celebrates forgotten childlike moments set to the sound of thumb-pianos. Inspired by European silhouette and folklore artists of the early 1900s, San Francisco street art, Japanese Manga, her favorite literature, the collective consciousness, turn of the century typography and European architecture, and the mixed Latin/Asian culture of the Philippines, Jenn’s aesthetic is as emotionally and socially meaningful as it is visually stunning. It is Porreca’s hope to remind the viewer to take time out to dance. Works of Porreca reside in the collections of Christopher Michael, Howard Cohn, Azita Gandge, Kate Melia, Michael Rushmore and Shane Ackeroyd.
www.jennporreca.com
###
For more information, hi res images or to set up an interview with the artists contact: Lee Joseph Publicity, p 818-848-2698 leejemail@gmail.com
