Michelle Nye

A painting by Jason Michael Aumann of a photograph of a victorian era woman, seen four times repeated, in progressive states of deterioration of the photograph, with painterly qualities of the four images. Generally tones of brown, white, cream and yellow seen throughout.

AMANDA BOE + JASON MICHAEL AUMANN + NIF HODGSON

AUG 2013 – OCT 2013

CURATOR Michelle Nye, Art at Colorflow

LOCATION Colorflow, Berkeley, California

SHOW LIST Exhibition image details

The Fall 2013 show of Art at Colorflow featured works by Amanda Boe, Jason Michael Aumann, and Nif Hodgson in the lobby areas of Colorflow Post, a full service post production facility specializing in Color Grading for film, broadcast and the web. Their beautiful space in the Zaentz Media Center was ideal for featuring rotating exhibitions of local painters, photographers and print-makers. Michelle Nye was curator for all five exhibitions, spanning the years 2012-2014.

The artists in this show share an interest in place, time, and memory. Each approaches these themes with differing mediums and motivations. Amanda Boe’s moody medium-format photography communicates her desire to locate home in past and present; Jason Michael Aumann’s ethereal mixed media pieces exude his appreciation of impermanence and imperfection; and Nif Hodgson’s quiet prints detail a nearly scientific interest in memory and perception. The unique outlook of each artist imbues similar subjects of place and memory with distinct aesthetics.

With Boe her saturated longing for home places the emphasis on the landscape – that which informs from without. The world at large impacts the viewer in an enveloping manner – comforting yet detached, alive yet anchored in the past. Her lens invites us to consider what remains the same through time, what shifts and evolves, and where memory blurs those lines.

For Hodgson the landscape is constructed through the unreliable perception of mind. She exposes the fragmented nature of this perception with a nearly scientific precision of line. She systematically explores the edges of representation defining the elements that construct a scene versus those that conceal. Sorting the complexity of the landscape in this elegantly reductive manner offers potential ground from which to process the enormity of data surrounding us.

Aumann’s transfer process removes most details from the found photographs he sources. He leaves behind variegated fields smudged with ghostly hints of a previous life that have slipped into a lulling fog of forgetfulness. These shifting fields communicate incorporeity, suggesting that which is indistinct and unfathomable, and remind us to let things dissolve as they may into the unknowable.

These three perspectives intersect to form an appreciation for the enormity of our physical and emotional landscapes. They deepen an understanding of our fickle memory and perception systems that do their best to construct meaning while entangled in time’s inevitable progression forward. It is was pleasure to bring their work together for this show at Colorflow in the Summer of 2013.

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EXHIBITION IMAGES

RECEPTION IMAGES

  • Installation shot of a table and chairs with the painting by Jason Michael Aumann of a photograph of a victorian era woman, seen four times repeated, in progressive states of deterioration of the photograph, with painterly qualities of the four images. Generally tones of brown, white, cream and yellow seen throughout.
  • Reception image of two people smiling at the camera, standing next to each other.
  • Reception image of four people talking holding cups, in front of a wall of photographs.
  • Reception image of three people talking in the foreground, and two in the background, with art on the walls in the distance.
  • Reception image of three people talking, in front of two photographs.

EXHIBITION INVITATION

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

AMANDA BOE
amandaboe.com

What I Hold Dear is a body of work that bridges the distance between my native home in South Dakota and my present life in California. After leaving the Midwest over a decade ago, I developed a deeper appreciation for the places that influenced my life and felt inspired to revisit them with my camera. I made a series of trips back to South Dakota, seeking out places from my past that resonate with me. At the same time, I continued to photograph in California and found myself drawn to scenery that reminded me of the Midwest: open, isolated, and quiet. These pictures depict the convergence of two worlds: looking back at a place left behind and searching for a sense of place in another. Moving through landscapes and interior spaces, a narrative began to unfold as I retraced my journey thus far. The process of photographing between California and South Dakota allowed me to address the feeling of being distanced yet emotionally attached to a place I once knew so well. What remains within me, and what I hold dear, is an innate longing for the familiar feeling of home.

NIF HODGSON
www.nifhodgson.com

From the casual glance to the idealized landscape, we compose a ‘whole’ impression of our surroundings by layering fragments of visual and sensorial information in relation to our physical orientation. Observations discern, overlook, rewrite, and never fully resolve, yet convey a fixed empirical presence. Experience, knowledge, and history inform this view and create unique meaningful moments. Our awareness is constantly in flux. How much do we direct this experience, and how much does our environment? I use the act of drawing and the mutable qualities of printmaking to explore perceptual experiences in our everyday surroundings, and create a space to consider how individual perceptions shapes our sense of place and understanding of the world around us.

JASON MICHAEL AUMANN
www.jmaumann.com

My paintings and mixed media encompass the three marks of existence in Buddhist philosophy. This notion contends that true appreciation of beauty comes from the understanding and acceptance that nothing lasts, nothing is perfect, and nothing is finished. I identify with this vision and apply it conceptually and aesthetically into my art practice. I work from found California snapshots from the turn-of-the-century to extract from them traces of the past, every day and universal. I then bring these images forward and reflect them in future states of decay and obscurity. Through this transformation, I explore our desire for remembrance against our temporal limitations, and reveal a beauty only found in the truth of the transience of all things.