Marc Dennis

The Exuberant Garden

ABOUT THIS PIECE: The Happy Life is about marriage, hence the white bouquet; family, hence the copulating and crawling insects; and the general aspects of life, such as change and gr...

ABOUT THIS PIECE: The Philosopher's Conquest is from the artists last show, An Artist, A Curator And A Rabbi Walk Into A Bar...,.The title of the exhib...

Represented by George Billlis Gallery. The bold flowers and repeating geometric patterns in this series of paintings are lushly modeled in oil paint, and are coupled with the use of inlaid wood. Surrounding the colorful and whimsical bouquets and garlands is a border of complimentary colors rife with kaleidoscopic floral images to further entice the eye. Influences of Persian miniatures and French Baroque are prevalent, as well as traditional floral painting which was used to document nature’s beauty. The artist states, “By using subject matter that is historically decorative and painterly, I seek to explore the medium’s more ethereal content.” The paintings become visually intense and hallucinatory as different varieties of flowers and leaves dance and intertwine in the geometry of the surrounding patterns. Traditionally mysticism was effectively communicated in painting through an assortment of lyrical, painterly indulgences, creating a supernatural, as well as an escapist experience. Matt Jacobs...

Calvert’s current paintings investigate the relationship between digital media and the reception and perception of images, and utilizes diverse technologies such as fresco, 3D modeling, AI and data manipulation through code. She is especially interested in the evolution of pictorial space. Today we view our screens and the world they occupy as a shallowly layered space of overlapping desktop windows. The picture plane has tilted up again from the flatbed to float in front of our eyes. Calvert’s paintings in turn depict an intermediate space, where the verticality of the still life paintings cohabitate with these digital panes. Dutch floral still life paintings encapsulate multiple concerns. Their subjects were botanical fantasies, emblems of an economic mirage that has contemporary corollaries. Most important to Calvert’s pictorial concerns, they depict ephemeral things in shallow and diagrammatic space - they are all foreground. They contain an abundance of visual information in overwhelming density, creating an allover resolution; a visual field that is equivalent to digital noise. By making painterly interventions into reproductions, Calvert attempts to dissolve the layer between the resolution of the source image and abstraction of the painted mark. ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ Tiffany Calvert has exhibited her work in the US and abroad including Lawrimore Project in Seattle, E.TAY Gallery in New York, the Speed Museum in Louisville and Cadogan Contemporary in London. Residencies include the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, I-Park, and ArtOmi International Arts Center where she received a Geraldine R. Dodge Fellowship. Calvert has received grants from the Great Meadows Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Her work was recently profiled by critic John Yau in the online journal Hyperallergic. Her curatorial projects include “Some Abstraction Occurs” at 65GRAND Gallery in Chicago and “Magic” at Mercer College (featuring work by Chris Martin, Karla Knight...