Masters Projects is pleased to announce a group exhibition of seven artists from around the country-Denver, Florida, North Dakota and Maine-as well as around the world-Netherlands, England and Germany. Titled after Rebecca Solnit’s 2013 publication about storytelling, Faraway Nearby explores the concept of distance, defined both physically and psychologically, through the mapping of time and history, space and remoteness, decay and transformation. Focusing on visual storytelling through a variety of media-painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, mixed-media, printmaking-this exhibition combines a uniquely diverse group of contemporary international artists: Peter Buechler, Karl Klingbiel, Billy Kidd, Erik Hougen, Cecilia Vissers, Kate Beck and Fiona Robinson.
Many of the works in this exhibition will be shown for the first time. The seven artists represented engage a variety of cultural differences, artistic processes and aesthetic traditions, while wrestling with complex topics such as the veracity of history, the nature of interpretation, subjective versus objective truth, and the ways in which objects and images from the past embody cultural memory. The diversity of these artists provide substantial evidence for the gallery’s interests in representing not just a local idealism, but an international one, from the Abstract Expressionist brushwork of Karl Klingbiel to the conceptual pixel paintings works of Peter Buechler, to the minimalist anodized aluminum sculptures of Cecllia Vissers.
Though each artist’s obvious uniqueness is celebrated, the generational span among them also reveals interesting parallels and influence: Klingbiel’s abstractions lead to Billy Kidds’s documentary photographs of decaying florals, to Fiona Robinson’s sensitive drawings of sea foam, to Kate Beck’s chance-driven exploration of painting. Buechler’s large scale pixel paintings of every interiors are reflected in Erik Hougen’s straight-photography-styled silkscreens on canvas, which reflect back on a separate series of found objects-antique lithographs of art historical landscape masked with vintage vellum. Ultimately, the seven are united by the conceptual construction of their imagery and the physical process entailed in its making, their artistic practice met with determination and profound self-awareness.