SHARON BRONZAN

The Presence of Absence

 

Sharon Bronzan paints imagery frozen in time: iconic and immortal.  Her softly colored gouache and acrylic paintings depict portraits that reveal a mythic side of self.  In this exhibition, The Presence of Absence, her personifications, in their timelessness, address mortality and loss. Ambiguous in their gender, their pensiveness and languor is melancholy.  Their gaze looks beyond us with emotional detachment.  The artist gives limited access, revealing only their heads and a few earthly elements as parts of their story.  They are being, not doing, and there is an inner yearning to the pause in their repose.  They tug at us to be included, but at the same time keep their distance; their fate frozen, they will never grow old.  Impartial players in their own play, their missing elements await revelation. Our intuition responds to their inner world.  In timelessness we are faced with time, in absence, presence: a paradox that pulls us in as a willing spectator only to reflect upon our own lives and stories.

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Press Release and Gallery Calendar Information:

EVENT:  THE LAURA RUSSO GALLERY IS PLEASED TO PRESENT:

 

Roll Hardy

We are pleased to present our third exhibition of paintings by the young artist, Roll Hardy.  Proving to be a contemporary Northwest regionalist, Hardy paints what he sees in the surrounding urban scape, responding particularly to places detached from mainstream society.  Hardy’s interest in these industrial landscapes and derelict sites comes from their archeological-like mystery, both from their place in history and in their detachment from time and space.  Hardy writes, “by attending to places whose very nature is one of neglect, I aim to present a different view where mystery and possibility thrive and change can take hold.”  Here, the adept painter, Hardy explores and develops his own distinctive realms.

 

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Collecting Art excerpt: Pacific Northwest College of Art lecture

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Following national trends, Portland advanced as a civic and economic entity and participated in social transformations with the rise of a middle-class.  During this period of great mercantile and industrial opportunities, a focus on home life went hand in hand with a burgeoning middle-class.  This period called the American Renaissance with its domestic focus encouraged a better educated and more self-conscious citizenry with higher aesthetic standards for the decorative and fine arts. 

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The feelings of civic pride that accompanied this Renaissance generated a "City Beautiful" movement.  Nationally, as the middle-class embraced a new materialism Portland developed residential areas noted for their handsome houses. And for the few there was a development of larger more ostentatious homes.  Residences such as the Failing’s and the Corbett’s took up entire city blocks downtown on Fifth.

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Sherrie Wolf brochure

 

...Northwest artist, Sherrie Wolf has long been inspired by still life and historical European and American paintings. Her imagery openly plays with art as artifice, incorporating 19th-century trompe-l’oeil tradition, and strong elements of both naturalism and surrealism. Her compelling technique of arranging still life’s in front of excerpts from old master paintings connects her to a history of reinterpretation and artistic borrowing. In her most recent body of work, Wolf explores the complexities of narrative, combining figurative painting with her sumptuous renditions of fruit and flora. Elements begin to interact; as the still life foliage playfully obscures the story of the figurative, the fragmentations of the figures suggest a fleshly provocative dialogue. It is in this exchange as the viewer becomes voyeur, that the artist discovers, through experimentation of juxtaposition and camouflage, a rich narrative resonance...