“Common Ground”

Exhibition Dates: 13 – 30 March, 2010

Opening: 7 – 10:30 pm, Saturday 13 March

Our upcoming exhibition features drawing contrasting the relationships between figuration and abstraction.

The space that our artists inhabit, between figuration and abstraction, is in the associative realm between the conscious and unconscious mind. This space is enigma, a seductive entity, suggestive of childhood memories and fantasies where we once scrawled with broken crayons. It sometimes bordering on the violent, sometimes on the sublime. We imagine it to be a malleable, liquid material that can be bent and molded at will.

Exhibiting will be Christopher Skura, Toyin Odutola, Franklin Sinanan, David Rohn, and Onajide Shabaka.

Toyin Odutola drawings are new to Miami. She says, “I am a draftswoman who deals in portraiture. Working with rudimentary tools, I desperately try to create complex entities.” Toyin Odutola’s massively strong, yet graceful figures, lyrically haunt and preoccupy our thoughts. Although still very young, Ms. Odutola invokes historical references that follow her like ghosts. They may be creations out of her imagination, but they continually creep up and out into our world with force.

There is a chilling patience in the drawings of Christopher Skura that reminds us to take note of his work. His works appear as slices, as sections in a sequence of interlocking objects. While we may be able to become lost in the smallest of spaces, between two dots on a field of yellow, we know the elastic band of reality will prevent us from falling in and free falling into infinity. Christopher Skura’s complex worlds are both organic and manufactured in a similar way as architectural building blocks and frameworks. Skura’s drawing takes us to an alternate reality enveloped in a high key golden aura.

“Untitled” © 2008
graphite, ink, colored pencil on paper.
Christopher Skura

David Rohn steps away from his performative work to show a few drawings that are both instructive and sensitive. David Rohn’s drawings have a variety of characters in different situation and different dramatic circumstances. His drawings, as blueprints, form guidelines and a map to instructive platforms of activity. They continually try to balance and push us toward a kind of accuracy and precision that is more about us than them.

Franklin Sininan’s raw vision, filled to the edges with tribal mask forms, textures, figures, loads of color, and graffiti, are what make up his painting and drawing. His Caribbean background certainly is an influence on his imagery and motifs. This tribal, motif filled art has a sense of immediacy and agency that envelopes each work in the contemporary art making process. There is a riotous abundance of color and a tendency toward optical overload that infuses his work.

Gagged
Nupastel, carbon smoke on paper
36 x 24 in.
© Onajide Shabaka

Using a fully engage working process, Onajide Shabaka’s various drawings use somewhat violent techniques in their creation by burning, erasing, rubbing, and smoking his surfaces. Not only are their emotional content highly charged, they creative process in brought about through a fully charged engagement with both the subject and medium. The burning and smoking of the drawing, though not destroying the paper’s surface, it creates a texture that mutes and highlights the line drawings, both at the same time leaving it with a translucence and aura.