Trang T. Lê's paintings and process are tied to a personal journey that follows an irregular course that spans early childhood to the present - the idyllic surroundings of her Vietnamese village, her experience as an immigrant fleeing the Vietnam war and the Communist regime of the 1980's, acclimating to a new country as a refugee and the numerous transitions in her recent past, are all distilled in the abstract paintings she has produced throughout her career as a painter. She has continuously and boldly drawn from her inner workings, while remaining keenly aware of and reacting to the world around her.

Lê's formal evolution with respect to marking-marking is intertwined with the personal narrative from which she draws. In 2010, the artist culminated a 56-foot long painting which honored and tallied civilian and soldier deaths of the Iraq war. The 111,978 tiny oil paint spirals she used as somber tally marks were gathered into a beautifully flowing composition. The piece was a rumination on human losses, as well as her own experiences with political conflict, but ultimately reflect on and radiate tranquility and healing. The conceptual underpinnings of this small mark made a dramatic shift in the matter of a couple years - from taking in the movements and details of a leaf in work produced in 2004, to an epic meditation on the consequences of war.

Her obsessive approach to painting continues to find new adaptations with this exhibition, where the spiral has unfurled and become tight loops and sinuous threads that float across the canvas. In this exhibition, Trang T. Lê's formal moves come together into single paintings where bold painterly smudging holds variously composed swirls and fibrous trails. With this combination comes a new dimensionality and grounding that retains the buoyancy of past work. Turmoil and grace, strength and vulnerability, intuition and calculation, gravity and weightlessness merge in these stirring paintings, where Trang finds strength and clarity. As has been the case with all her work, she gets lost in obsessive delineations which become cathartic acts, filtered through personal toil, joy, survival and triumphant transition.

Trang T. Lê received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2006. This exhibition is accompanied by a book titled Gentle Wave, that traces her personal journey and artistic evolution. 

Trygve Faste responds to prevailing currents in contemporary products, design and technology through abstract paintings that address the aesthetic and cultural impact of these forces. Faste's particular language of abstraction expresses a fascination with the visual aspect of consumerism, while acknowledging the correlating complexities that come with it – particularly issues pertaining to outward perception. Faste uses visual cues of product design within the practice of fine art to incite a conversation about how images (or products) are comprehended and intended to be read and the consequences of those choices.

Faste's work begins with an architectural approach where hand and computer-generated drawing help form the intricate substructures for his paintings. Through the use of airbrush and painting, his surfaces slowly evolve into spatially complex objects, where illusion of depth supports actual dimensionality and vise versa. While the bright palette and angularity of the work creates a kinship with the slickness of a manufactured product, there is an enduring intimacy that most industry does not achieve or even strive for. The slight lift of built-up paint, evidence of a moving hand to push paint across the surface, and imperfectly articulated transitions keeps the work grounded in the world of painting.

"My current body of work uses abstraction to reference the aesthetic sensibility of the many contemporary products and technologies that I find fascinating," Faste states. "Similar to the way in which science fiction can address societal issues in a way that removes them from the immediate reality of politics so that they can be more openly and less controversially discussed, I use these paintings to examine the duality of futuristic opportunity and tragic side effect that can be found in many aspects of consumerism. The relationship of appearance to substance in design can be fickle. It is also an area that naturally merges with my interest in the interconnected nature of image as realized through graphics on form."

Trygve Faste received an MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a BA in Mathematics-Computer Science and Studio Art from Whitman College. Trygve Faste lives and works in Eugene, Oregon where he is an Assistant Professor of Product Design at The University of Oregon.