Abstraction, People and Landscape

Holly Coulis

Tomory Dodge

Tim Garwood

Jackie Gendel

Christy Matson

Philip Martin Gallery is proud to present, Abstraction, People and Landscape, a group exhibition featuring the work of Holly Coulis, Tomory Dodge, Tim Garwood, Jackie Gendel and Christy Matson. These five artists consider abstraction as a means by which to think about people and landscape as motif.

Holly Coulis's work draws on portraiture, landscape and still-life to construct a terminology of line, color, shape, touch and paint materiality. Coulis invites the viewer into a conversation with the terms of the art object. Writing on Swiss master Paul Klee, British artist Bridget Riley notes, "Every painter starts with elements - lines, colors, forms - that are essentially abstract in relation to the pictorial experience that can be created with them."

Tomory Dodge's work explore mechanics of picture-making. His paintings have a deep sense of pictorial space, built initially on patterns of stripes and shapes, over which he lays in a network of expressive brushwork, dots and lines. The result is a pictorially engaged surface of striking color combinations and active mark-making. "I have often talked about paintings being inherently contradictory things. They are objects that are spaces, walls that are windows. They are the intersection of object and image. Painting maintains a physical anchor at a time when the image generally is becoming more and more ethereal -- everywhere and nowhere at the same time."

Tim Garwood's work engages with abstraction as a mode of personal expression. His paintings foreground a deep engagement with urban and rural environs and reflect the ways in which we live today, often standing with our feet in multiple worlds. The compositional energy, dynamic color and rich texture of Garwood's work derives in part from the feeling of London and rural Somerset. In Garwood's practice, "there are no obstacles between abstraction and association, improvisation, and control, only the endless exploration, transformative capabilities and potential possibilities of painting itself." Garwood himself points to the power of looking and responding: "I am happy to allow myself to follow spontaneous thoughts and accept that occasionally that takes me in unexpected directions."

Jackie Gendel's pictures address the female figure while at the same time exploring pattern, collage-space and color. "I try to get to a place that is unexpected to me," Jackie Gendel writes. Working with an eye towards both art history and contemporary visual culture, the loose, interpretative feeling of Gendel's paintings not only engages our sense of the world today, but also reminds us of pieces by major Modernists such as Sonia Delaunay, Hannah Hoch, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova. "I paint people because the process of painting a portrait is similar to identity formation...the materials, the spills, the language, tells me who this person is becoming." Gendel's direct mark-making plays off the subtle atmospheres she creates, back-stopping her gestured brushwork with flows of liquid color.

Christy Matson's woven, wall-mounted works combine the skill, sensitivity and craft of painting and hand weaving with the artist-directed process of an industrial Jacquard loom. The result is an art object of beauty and depth that reveals important details with regard to art objects, how we make them, and how we look at them. Matson begins her process with watercolors, ink drawings, collages and other works on paper. She then uses a digital process to translate these compositions into instructions her loom can understand, and, as she works the machine, improvises on the weft (horizontal rows) with creativity and nuance.

Holly Coulis (b. 1968, Toronto, Canada) received her BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design (Toronto, Canada) in 1995 and her MFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA) in 1998. Coulis lives and works in Athens, GA.

Tomory Dodge (b. 1974, Denver, CO) received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA) in 2004. Dodge lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Jackie Gendel (b. 1973, Houston, TX) received a BA from Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO) and an MFA from Yale University (New Haven, CT). Gendel lives and works in Providence, RI.

Tim Garwood (b. 1984, Epsom, UK) lives and works in London and Somerset.

Christy Matson (b. 1979, Seattle, WA) received her BFA from the University of Washington (Seattle, WA) and her MFA from California College of the Arts (San Francisco, CA). Christy Matson lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.