LAURA BEARD: New Paintings (Main Gallery)
ROBERT PETTUS: 8 min. 20 sec. (Project Room)
MARTIN BRIEF: Artforum Series (Front Room)
CHERIE SAMPSON: River of Spirit of Life (New Media Room)
(Oct 31, 2008 to Nov 29, 2008)
Bruno David Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Laura Beard. This exhibition titled New Paintings shows the ways in which Laura smoothly integrates influences of painterly abstraction with a distinctly modern and inventive style.
Laura Beard's work has been described by art critic Jeff Daniel as "having an ability to move forward while keeping a firm grip on art history's recent past." She is able to produce energetic paintings that contain an aesthetic that is truly new. Laura Beard's paintings combine both texture and color in such a way as to demonstrate the power and dynamism that is so characteristic of painterly abstraction. Her works are marked by a degree of chaos that is beautifully countered by geometric sequences. This combination brings continuity to her paintings, resulting in a serene sense of balance.
Laura Beard was born in Plattsburg, New York. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and printmaking from Colorado State University and a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Washington in Seattle. She lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri.
In the Project Room, Robert Pettus is presenting a series of photographs entitled 8 min. 20 sec. Much of Pettus's work in inspired by an interest in the effects of time. He succeeds in capturing the various hues, tones, and colors that elusively shift throughout the day, change with the four seasons, and vary in response to weather conditions. He achieves this result by capturing the same image over an extended period of time, from the exact same vantage point, at various times throughout the day. Pettus uses a minimalist aesthetic that arrests the formal qualities of light as it falls upon and defines the forms in his photographs. His work not only alludes to the essence of time and memory, but also effectively encapsulates those fleeting moments that usually go unnoticed. Robert Pettus was born in 1938. He graduated from Washington University and currently lives and works in St Louis, Missouri. Robert Pettus' photographic works have appeared in major architectural magazines including: Architectural Record, Architecture, Domus, Japan Architecture, and featured in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.
In the Front Room, Martin Brief is showing his recent work in an exhibition entitled Artforum Series. His current project is comprised of a series of drawings, each representing a single issue of ARTFORUM Magazine from September 2007 to Summer 2008. Each monthly issue contains 2,500 to 4,000 names, that he transcribed slightly larger or smaller to fit on a 10.5 square inch format (the exact format of ARTFORUM Magazine). Much like Brief's earlier projects, this work reduces the artists' names cited in the publication to a series of beautiful, spare drawings. This work can be viewed in two ways: first, as a series of indistinguishable, dark gray squares and secondly, as an intensely intricate schematic. These diametric ways of thinking give rise to two interpretations of the work. The drawings can be perceived as historic markers of this moment in art as seen by the art industry's premiere publication or as an absurdly obsessive system designed to describe the passing of a year. In either case, these drawings stand as a monument to art, artists and the art world. Martin Brief was born and raised in Chicago. He currently lives in St. Louis where he is an Assistant Professor at St. Louis University.
In the New Media Room, video artist Cherie Sampson premieres a short video titled River of Spirit of Life (ice piece). In the current video piece, the artist inserts her body into natural landscapes, placing herself in the homeland of [her] maternal ancestry. The piece, which began as a series of personal rituals, is informed by artistic themes and movements such as classicism, the nude and abstraction, minimalism, feminism, and contemporary performance practices. Working within an intensely slow movement vocabulary, the human form becomes an extension of the architecture of nature and an embodiment of its temporal realities and cyclical change. While evocative of the movement style of Japanese Butoh and other forms of ritual dance, both eastern and western, the artist focuses on no one single technique, but allows it to emerge as a sensory, bodily, and spiritual response to the immediate environment. While a form of self-portraiture, the video does not portray self as a personality as much as a universal self that is at once an integral part of nature and distinguishable from it in its (our) finite human journey. Cherie Sampson lives and works in Columbia, Missouri, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Missouri. Sampson received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa.
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