PAST PROJECT

Structure and Relation

Paintings and collage by Babette Herschberger

Babette Herschberger was born in Indiana and currently lives and works in Miami, Florida. Herschberger's colorful abstractions are at once formal, yet very personal. Of her process she says, "My approach to working is very intuitive; usually there are no sketches to work from and little predetermined choice of color. The result is the physical consequence of a dialog between myself and my materials while I am working. I'm particularly intrigued by the contrast of manmade objects like signs, billboards and architecture upon the natural world. These unnatural interruptions in the landscape become graphic mirrors of nature itself: street lights mimic trees; dwellings may as well be large boulders; neighborhoods and skyscrapers give rise to the elevation in a cityscape. I move through my everyday life preoccupied with viewing and often photographing these juxtapositions."

Indeterminate Reality

Paintings and mixed media works by Mary Larsen

Raised in New York City, Mary Larsen currently resides in Miami. Larsen describes her work this way, Kant's interpretation of the sublime as 'revealing a reality that is fundamentally indeterminate, un-decidable, and un-presentable,' is at the core of my work. The power of nature, geometry and chance coalesce to form an unsettling place that glimpses the possibility of transcendence. Often, I find balance and harmony through imbalance and dissonance. By both obscuring and revealing; rubbing out and making marks, erasing one history and replacing it with another, a new narrative emerges only to disappear. Random elements are transformed into purpose. The process is a transformative experience that informs the work, with each layer adding richness and depth, creating intimacy. The idea is slowly revealed, mirroring the layers of the subconscious thought process.'

Under the Bridge Art Space

Still Lives, Paintings by Kristen Thiele

Kristen Thiele's images are derived from the motion pictures of the 1930s through the 1950s. She's particularly interested in this era of film and how it aligns with the concept of artifice via opulent and escapist themes. The subjects of her paintings are about the fleeting, the missing, and the unattainable, however as paintings they become the very antithesis of the ephemeral. This contradictory concept is also contained in the idea we may not connect to these early images except through the platforms of our modern technologies. This new access to "old" materials has created a contemporary anachronism where anything recorded may be accessed. These images and sounds are part of our contemporary consciousness along with all the other things that make up our world. As a contemporary artist, Thiele is responding to the "new" subject of these old movies. In painting these images, she has internalized every detail of the source image. Every brushstroke is a result of her looking at each part of the image with equal attention and focus. Kristen's paintings are a product of her absorption of the images that she chooses and of her processing those images through the action of painting.

In Still Lives, Kristen Thiele's image choices speak to isolation, the anonymity of the crowd, ambiguity, the space between action and reaction, and the ignored places between the deliberate and the staged.

Kristen Thiele was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and lives and works in Miami, Florida.