Showing posts with label rosemary meza-desplas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rosemary meza-desplas. Show all posts

Friday, July 20, 2012

Opening Reception August 2012 Exhibitions

2156 N. Damen Avenue · Chicago, Illinois 60647 · 773-252-2232
Join us for our Opening Reception
Friday, July 27 from 6-9 pm
ARC would like to invite you to a remarkable new display of works of artists Rosemary Meza-DesPlas, Claire Putney, Michelle Cox and Jackie Hoysted. Please join us for these four provocative exhibits referencing the every-day influences which have come to affect all of us.
Exhibition dates: July 25 through August 18, 2012
Gallery hours: Wed to Sat 12-6 pm, and Sun. 12-4 pm

Current Exhibit

Rosemary Meza-Desplas

ROSEMARY MEZA-DESPLAS: "CAP THE VIOLENCE; PILE ON THE SEXY"  
mixed media


"Once upon a time there were three little girls who went to the police academy....but I took them away from all that...my name is Charlie."

1970s television shows like Charlie's Angels, Policewoman and Get Christie Love presented a stereotypical sexy female crime fighter. Thirty years later "jiggle TV" still lives but there is a wide gap between the sexy myth of female crime fighters and criminals and the more complex reality.

In her new exhibit of watercolors and hand-sewn hair drawings, Cap the Violence; Pile on the Sexy, Rosemary Meza-DesPlas reflects with humor and sensitivity on violence, the sexy and femininity. "The sight of women with ostensibly deadly weapons challenges our preconceptions about the female or maternal role. Is violence the province of the masculine, not the feminine?"

Current Exhibit

Claire Putney

CLAIRE PUTNEY: "WISH YOU WERE HERE"
drawings

Experiences of travel were once shared through the artifact of the postcard. They described the smells, colors and shapes of a landscape that were left to the imagination of the receiver. The magic of hand written letters has been lost to travel blogs, skyping, emails and text messages.

Wish You Were Here pays homage to the hand written postcard. Claire Putney's large-scale drawings are based upon the written correspondence of loved ones through postcards and personal letters.

Putney's work explores the relationship between human experience and topographical landscapes. Together, they form an intriguing geography that gives evidence to one's physical and emotional relationship with a place and the histories that are created there.

Current Exhibit

Michelle Cox

MICHELLE COX:   "THE NURSE'S HOUSE"
photography

Michelle Cox sees the the Midwest changing before her eyes. The shift from abandoned industry to technology suggests hidden beauty. Cox sees these areas for their details and seeks to draw attention to the seemingly insignificant items. This photographic array, The Nurse's House, presents their stories through her photography once more before the locations and objects are gone.

Current Exhibit

Jackie Hoysted

JACKIE HOYSTED: "SEND ME YOUR LAST CIGARETTE"
mixed media


Jackie Hoysted is an Irish native and Maryland resident who is exploring the psychology of smoking and quitting through her art project Send Me Your Last Cigarette. Hoysted's mixed media work revolves around the opposing notions of destruction/healing and death/resurrection. After destroying paper with a lighter (a metaphor for herself as smoker), she encases the paper in wax, as if to mummify it. She also creates funerary temples for others embarking on the same journey - creating art out of their last cigarettes and honoring their new path to freedom from nicotine addiction.

Friday, October 28, 2011

Bad Girls

The term “la gancha” or “the hook,” typically refers to women who are used in organized drug trafficking to lure male victims. In La Gancha 1 & 2, Rosemary Meza-Desplas removes the veil of glamour often draped over images of female criminals. Floating against a white backdrop, female figures seem to emerge from flame decals, wielding weapons in their outstretched hands.

Consistent with Meza-Desplas’s approach to figures, she strips their bodies of the glossy veneer that camouflages the realness of the female form. As delicate as the stippled watercolors that compose their features, these women are disarming gun slingers. Subtle displays of age - sagging skin, crow’s feet, spectacles - reveal life and complexity. Meza-Desplas takes the concept of the la gancha and re-humanizes her; allowing a new image to emerge from the flames like a phoenix.

Get your fix at ARC today and tomorrow only!

By Rachel Brown