Fractured Atlas

Brant Moorefield

Anna Ortiz

Gretchen Scherer

Fractured Atlas features the work of Brant Moorefield, Anna Ortiz and Gretchen Scherer, artists who take landscape and interior space as the starting point for paintings that alter the coordinates of visual reality. All three are talented young artists who skillfully manipulate the conventions of representation to startling, personal effect.

Brant Moorefield makes paintings that are concerned with the interaction between visual and psychological landscapes. His work is an expression of the meaning that we project onto what we see around us, as well as painting’s transformative ability to reveal what is hidden in a subject. In his work, clusters of objects and places from the natural, urban and domestic worlds are combined and transmuted into new, often personified forms. Some of the pieces are more about memory and imagination than present place, but the method of study remains the same. Moorefield creates paintings that speak about our world and our inner selves in a contemporary way, while remaining freely influenced by the tradition of the practice.

Brant Moorefield received a BFA in sculpture from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1993 and an MFA in painting from SUNY Albany in 1999. His work is in various private and public collections and has been exhibited throughout the United States. He lives in Queens, New York.

With their painterly expression, historical references and filtered palettes, Anna Ortiz’s paintings call into question the successes and failures of representational painting in a digital era. Working with images of recent disasters culled from the internet, her landscapes ask the viewer to pause on the aftermath of a disaster scene. Ortiz reconstructs the aftermath of these disasters through a layered process of building maquettes and painting. Through this process, the impossibility of the image, the compression of information and loss of the definable allow the viewer new entry into an otherwise unknowable space.

Anna Ortiz studied art history and painting at Tufts, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Louvre. Ortiz completed her MFA studies in painting while attending Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and in Rome. She has been awarded several residencies and fellowships both in and outside of the United States.

Gretchen Scherer imagines spaces in a way that is vastly different from the way those spaces actually appear. Distant memories and sparse visual clues are the basis for her work, and she is intrigued by how these processes summon images from the imagination. Scherer begins by collaging photographs from old interior design books and then making paintings based on the collages. In past work she limited herself to places she had actually been to, but she has found the images from books resonate with her even though she has never experienced them, a kind of déjà vu of familiarity mixed with mystery. “Sometimes it feels as if I am stuck on this side of things-that there may be another unseen world that we are all also a part of and can make visible through looking at and making paintings.”

Gretchen Scherer was born in 1979 in Indianapolis, Indiana, and received a BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MFA from Hunter College in 2006. She was awarded a Graf travel grant to Berlin and attended Skowhegan Residency. Her work has been shown in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.