Past Exhibitions: 2018 & Before
Gail Peter Borden: Diverse Fields
November 17 - December 29, 2018
After more than a decade of exhibiting with Galleri Urbane, Gail Peter Borden returns to Dallas to present Diverse Fields. While many of Borden’s recent exhibitions with the gallery have included explorations in a wide range of media, including works on paper and welded-steel objects, this exhibition is comprised entirely of the resined panel paintings that have become a signature of the artist’s oeuvre. In each of his roles as an artist, architect, author, and professor, Borden’s projects are always driven by an interest in material, perception, and composition. This exhibition is no exception, including work that is rooted in ideas of spatial creation and the optics of perception.
Loring Taoka: I’m Going Hunting
November 17 - December 29, 2018
In an unprecedented manner, Galleri Urbane has the honor of hosting Loring Taoka’s second solo exhibition in the same year. A follow-up to February’s exhibition, Counteract, Taoka’s latest body of work reflects numerous bold developments that have occurred in the months since. I’m Going Hunting furthers Taoka’s investigation of perception, utilizing his paintings on plexiglass that lie at the crux of the digital and physical realms.
Donald Martiny: Epistrophy
October 13 - November 10, 2018
Galleri Urbane welcomes back Donald Martiny for his third solo exhibition with the gallery. Part of our roster since 2013, his career has steadily grown to secure an international presence through museum, gallery, and art fair presentations around the world. Known for his distinctive approach to freeing the act ofpainting from the confines of a rectilinear canvas, Martiny hascontinuously developed new approaches to his signature large- scale brushstrokes that obscure the boundaries between painting and sculpture.
Jessica Snow: Master of the Nets
October 13 - November 10, 2018
Galleri Urbane is honored to welcome back San-Francisco-based artist Jessica Snow for her third solo exhibition with the gallery. Since her Dallas debut in 2013 with the exhibition In Living Color, Snow’s paintings have become instantly recognizable for their highly formal, vividly colored compositions. The conceptual underpinnings of her work have been informed by wide-ranging subjects including the mid-century modernist architecture of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, string theory, and the graphic musical scores of John Cage. Snow’s latest paintings for this exhibition, however, are borne from a much more introspective and personal journey that commenced during her travels in China last summer.
Synchrodogs: Slightly Altered
September 8 - October 6, 2018
For their 2015 Supernatural series, commissioned by Dallas Contemporary, photography duo Synchrodogs traveled the American southwest, capturing the geography through a sublime approach that blurred the line between the real and the imagined. In Slightly Altered, the artists present a new series of photographs that transports its viewers to the Carpathian Mountains of their native Ukraine. If the soul of the American southwest is a desert, the soul of the Ukranian Carpathian Mountain Range is an overwhelming green forest. Made over the course of one month while traveling across the terrain, the series advances Synchrodogs’ unique perspective of mankind’s complex relationship with the natural world.
Heath West: Villas
September 8 - October 6, 2018
As a former design architect turned full-time visual artist, Heath West’s work is driven by a shared concern for the framing of spatial forms found in the histories of architecture, cinema, and painting. Through a highly selective use of color, line, and space, the paintings present architectural spaces in their purest forms. Like a movie set void of figures or objects, the empty places in these paintings allow West to highlight the structural elements that provide the foundation of these interests.
Bread & Butter
June 23 - August 25, 2018
Making use of the gallery’s entire exhibition space, Bread & Butter offers a rare chance to present the core of the gallery’s artistic vision outside of the standard solo-exhibition format. The show draws from all new work created in the last year by numerous gallery artists, intending to provide our audiences with the latest updates from our artists’ studios located around the country.
Mel Prest : lux
May 12 - June 16, 2018
Featuring all new work made in the last year, lux pays homage to two cities whose atmospheric, geographic, and architectural qualities offer vastly different sensational impressions. The blankets of fog and floral scents of coastal San Francisco are reflected in paintings like Buttercup Aurora (2017), where the artist’s characteristic, hand-painted lines, applied in yellow and white, overlap in loose geometries to create a soft haze of subtle yellow. In contrast, the artist’s travels to Mexico City, with its brightly colored markets and buildings, come to mind in works like Barragán 3 (2018) in which lines of green and grey intersect to activate a viewer’s eyes with an oscillating energy. Composed of 38 solid-colored panels arranged to shift from pale pink to deep magenta to yellow amber, Bougainvillea (2017) references the vibrant hues found at the studio and home of Mexican architect Luis Barragán.
Danielle Kimzey : Viewfinder
May 12 - June 6, 2018
Galleri Urbane is pleased to present our first solo show by Dallas-based artist Danielle Kimzey. Titled Viewfinder, the exhibition will present a body of all new paintings that present a fragmented glance into the everyday world of the artist. In this series of work, Kimzey finds an interest in her experience of time, though not in a grand, scientific manner, but rather in the quiet, often-overlooked moments that mark her daily existence. Dwelling on these episodes for longer inspection, Kimzey considers them from multiple viewpoints, translating them into complex, vibrant abstractions.
Samamntha McCurdy : Personal Boundaries
April 7 - May 5, 2018
For her first solo exhibition at Galleri Urbane, titled “Personal Boundaries,” Samantha McCurdy finds interest in the instances where physical boundaries are worn thin to reveal the heightened mental power that one can forge. A frightened child, for instance, can protect themselves from imaginary intruders with the help of only a bedsheet. With a background in fashion and styling, McCurdy has developed a keen awareness to the way in which certain articles of clothing provide a similar duality, allowing one to reveal their body while simultaneously keeping it protected and unavailable to others.
The shaped paintings in the exhibition reference the material qualities of those very articles of clothing. Substituting traditional canvas for thin, stretchable spandex, the works call to mind form-fitting attributes of yoga pants or a swimsuit. Hidden behind the painted stretched fabric, each painting conceals spherical objects that bulge beyond the confines of the rectangular frame. Painted in vivid tones of orange and pink, or a nude that more directly alludes to a human figure, viewers are enticed to imagine what remains concealed. Tightly arranged, each work’s protrusions extend to its neighbor and seemingly reach for physical contact but ultimately never overstep that boundary. Each painting creates moments of tension through its invitation to imagine what lies hidden underneath the delicate surface and through its suggestive physical orientation, all the while maintaining its own unwavering agency.
Kristin Skees : Close Knit
April 7 - May 5, 2018
The photographs in Kristin Skees’ exhibition “Close-Knit” present an intriguing approach to the long-standing tradition of portraiture. When viewers approach these photographs from the artist’s ongoing Cozy Portraits series, they are denied central components that ordinarily allow for a deeper reading of a portrait: a sitter’s facial expression or the nuances that lie in a sitter’s body position. Instead, the subjects of Skees’ photos, who are often close friends and family, don knitted “cozies” that obscure their physical features. Like an ill-fitting handmade sweater, the cozies envelop the subjects’ bodies and make for portraits that are both specific and universal, representational and abstract.
Loring Taoka : Counteract
February 17 - March 24, 2018
Loring Taoka’s paintings in “Counteract,” present a unique and refreshingly innovative take that collectors have come to prize. Abandoning the traditional canvas or panel surface, his paintings are created on sheets of clear plexiglass that seem to disappear altogether when viewed from certain angles, complicating the idea of a fixed, stable ground. As light passes through the paintings, shadows of the painted two-dimensional objects fall on the wall behind them, solidifying their potential for sharing our three-dimensional existence in the world.
Taoka’s subject matter also presents a more contemporary example of optical illusion, rendering objects that resemble symbols and icons of a life based in the digital sphere. The artist takes basic geometry as a starting point, using it to build more complex forms that suggest a digitally rendered model floating in space. He is able to achieve various visual effects by flattening certain aspects of the shape with saturated hues of color and inverting highlights and shadows that distort it in surprising ways. There lies a tension between the illusion of a digitally produced model and the reality of a painting produced by the hand of the artist. The visual information provided lies on the line of being read as “real” or “fake.” Ultimately, the artist seeks to call the viewer to question what they are seeing, what they are understanding, and how that understanding shifts as one moves in space.
Jeffrey cortland jones : new clear dawn
February 17 - March 24, 2018
There are visual moments from everyday life that often escape one’s consciousness. The way in which the color planes of sky and sea meet at a distant, indecipherable point on the horizon; the layering of color patches that mask graffiti tags on the side of a building; a cadence of rubber tire marks built up on the highway median. It is overlooked moments like these that inform the paintings of Jeffrey Cortland Jones and his exhibition “New Clear Dawn” at Galleri Urbane this winter, calling for one to take a slower, closer look.
Caroline Lathan-stiefel : churn dash
January 6 - February 10, 2018
Caroline Lathan-Stiefel’s delicately-webbed “drawings-in-space” cover, divide, encircle, and fill spaces. Often large in scale, they activate opportunities for viewers to develop a physical experience of the work as one navigates around it. Lathan-Stiefel’s Wider Than the Sky Redux (2014) remains a suitable example of these statements, originally exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville’s monumental atrium. Composed of multiple meticulously-constructed structures of wire, sewn fabric patches, wire cleaner, and plastic suspended in the space, the installation draws inspiration from the rhizomatic structure of the brain and its circuitry after the artist’s father suffered an episode of encephalitis that caused damage to the speech and language area of the brain. Driven by an interest in how the brain can be damaged and “regrow” itself, the installation utilizes the humblest of materials to offer a delicate yet impactful visual expression of this triumph.
arden bendler browning : all at once
January 6 - February 10, 2018
ith each new day, familiar landscapes are turned inside out through jolting “unprecedented” occurrences – the latest public events as well as the intimate developments within a household.
Much like the history that shapes the urban environment that has long informed my studio practice, my personal history and geography is a significant filter for my work. I record what I see continuously – photographs of urban contrasts, color, and light – sometimes at home, often in transit, one eye on my children, the other eye capturing a part of the world in that instant. Travel – whether the everyday paths throughout my urban home base, or the moving landscape from my lengthy, diverse road trips with my family – has become the common thread throughout my work.
My paintings reflect the current obsession with being everywhere at once by squeezing an abundance of visual information into a compact visual language. Persistent tension about time and memory has translated to obsessively documenting everyday moments with an omnipresent smart phone. Downsizing and enlarging expanses captured from a handheld lens mirrors the shifts between real and virtual – natural and artificial. It colors, distills, and distorts life sharply. Further layering of image upon image develops visually complex representations and also alludes to the impossibility of fully capturing, knowing, or reaching a destination.
Jessica Drenk - States of matter
October 14 - December 29, 2017
Galleri Urbane is proud to announce that Florida based artist, Jessica Drenk, will have her fourth solo show, “States of Matter”, at GUMD opening October 14. Focused on mankind’s evolving relationship to nature, Jessica Drenk’s newest bodies of work complicate the definition of “manmade” and “natural” objects by combining both into pieces that defy categorization. To Drenk, the material is content. She chooses everyday materials for their inherent content. She is particularly enthralled by the ontology of books, writing materials, and the connotations of knowledge and production present in the object. Her process then continues with the precision and methodic grace that governs the growth patterns of trees, the melting of ice, and the formations left behind in sedimentary rocks after thousands of years. In her own words, “on a long enough time scale, there is no difference between manmade and nature”. The artist’s act of reshaping everyday objects - is disorientating and disrupts our tendency to categorize manmade and natural objects separately. In “States of Matter”, Drenk presents pieces from several bodies of work, including Reading our Remains, Immutable Ice, and Circulation.
Rachel Hellmann - Doubling the cube
November 18 - December 29, 2017
Solo Exhibition - Gallery Two
sidney mullis - preservation of forgetting
September 9 - October 7, 2017
Solo Exhibition - Gallery One
ABBY SHERRILL - Modes of Moving Air
October 14 - November 14, 2017
Solo Exhibition - Gallery Two
Marion Wesson - Cluster Fail
May 13 - June 17, 2017
Solo Exhibition - Gallery Two
Anna Kunz - Heroes for Ghosts
April 1 - June 17, 2017
Solo Exhibition - Gallery One
Stephen D'Onofrio - Ready to Print
April 1 - May 6, 2017
Solo Exhibition - Gallery Two
Heath West - Neighborhood of Infinity
February 18 - March 25, 2017
Solo Exhibition - Gallery One
Lucy Kirkman Allen - When a Man's house is finished
February 18 - March 25, 2017
Solo Exhibition - Gallery Two
Mel Davis - a mirror, a window, a pool
January 7 - February 11, 2017
Solo Exhibition - Gallery Two
Lindsey Landfried - Skyline Drive
January 7 - February 11, 2017
Solo Exhibition - Gallery One
Painting, Process, Materials, Texture
November - December, 2016
Group Exhibition - Eric Shaw, Anna Kunz, Stephen D'Onofrio, Bradley Biancardi, Heather Bause
Donald MArtiny - Moving Paint
October - November, 2016
Solo Exhibition - Gallery One
Loring Taoka - Soft Edge
October - November, 2016
Solo Exhibition - Gallery Two
Gail Peter Borden - Controlled Objects
September - October, 2016
Solo Exhibition - Gallery Two
Rachel Hellmann - Quadline
April 2016
Solo Exhibition - Gallery Two
Dylan Cale Jones - Good Work
February 20 - March 28, 2016
Solo Exhibition - Gallery One
Royal Jarmon - Duck in the Water
January 2016
Solo Exhibition - Gallery Two
Jessica Snow - Refraction in the line of sight
November 2015
Solo Exhibition - Gallery One
Jessica Drenk - Ad Infinitum
September 12 - October 12, 2015
Solo Exhibition - Gallery One
HERE AND NOW - 2nd Annual Juried Exhibition
August 8 - September 8, 2015
Group Exhibition - Matthew Craig,
Brent Hallard,
Lindsey Landfried,
Lori Larusso,
Melinda Laszczysnki,
Danny Rose,
Keith Allyn Spencer,
Loring Taoka,
Michael Wille
SUMMER GROUP EXHIBITION - Deja vu
June - August, 2015
Including :
Heather Bause
Irby Pace - Explosions in the sky
April - May 3, 2015
Solo Exhibition - Gallery One
Girls Just Wanna. . .
Group Show Featuring Gallery Artists and Visiting Artists
May 14 - June 18, 2016
Gail Peter Borden - Faceted Lines
February 21 - March 21, 2015
Solo Exhibition
Jeffrey Cortland Jones - Movement, Substance, Technique
January 10 - February 10, 2015
Solo Exhibition - Gallery One
Jason Willaford - Bring into the fold
November 22, 2014 - January 5, 2015
Solo Exhibition
Natural Selection: The Work of Brett Weston
September 6, 2014
September 6, 2014
Curators Statement
The work of Brett Weston is first and foremost about composition.
Working with large format cameras, he wrestled through the landscapes of California, Texas, Alaska, Mexico and others to achieve a level of formalism in his photographs with a dedication that bordered on obsession. While Brett applied his tenaciousness to many types of subject matter, he was most successful in a natural setting. He was a master at framing the elements of the landscape under natural light to create his vision of shape and form. Throughout his almost seventy year career as a photographer, Weston always returned to natural settings, including his final works in Hawaii. This exhibit will include fifty photographs spanning the breadth of Brett Weston’s career. Selections of work from Mexico, California, Texas, Europe, Alaska and Hawaii will be shown along with several iconic images including Holland Canal and Garrapata Beach. Curated by Julie Maguire
private curator for the Keesee Collection and Director for the Brett Weston Archives.