October 25th - November 19th

Lorraine Bubar – Underwater
Katie Crown – Audiences

Carol Kleinman – The Secret Life of Windows

Opening Reception:

Saturday, November 5^th, 2016 from 5-8PM

Artist Panel:

Saturday, November 12^th, 2016, 3pm

Lorraine Bubar – Underwater

Lorraine Bubar’s newest body of intricate papercut work is titled Under Water. Bubar has always been fascinated with the ebb and flow of water and the subsequent creation of abstract patterns that break up the images beneath its surface. 

Bubar’s work is influenced by her love of Japanese woodblock prints and traditional folk art from a variety of countries around the world.  She takes a contemporary, painterly approach to the heritage of paper cutting, using colored papers that primarily originate from Nepal and Japan.  Her technique, utilizing an X-acto knife, creates an intricate, often symmetrical lacework while the subsequent layering and texture of the papers produces depth.  The best way to appreciate this powerful imagery is to observe it up close and be awed by the detail in her handwork.

Under Water finds Bubar implementing koi fish as central figures in her visual narrative. Traditionally, koi symbolize a commanding and vibrant life force, as demonstrated by their ability to swim against currents and even travel upstream. Bubar uses this ideology of perseverance, good fortune, success, prosperity, longevity, and courage as the underlying common theme that ties her graphic narrative together.

In a time when people are feeling submerged “under water” with the pressures of daily life and a increasingly mechanized and monotonous environment, Bubar continues to create pieces that intentionally highlight the handmade nature of her work, connecting to

a historical heritage that crosses the boundaries of craft and fine art.  The images are powerful yet relaxing, swirling with movement and aesthetically pleasing colors. While her subject matter lives below the water’s surface, Under Water aims to lift our spirits, to incite the same perseverance and resolve in the viewer as the koi themselves. 

Katie Crown – Audiences

TAG Gallery’s exhibition of paintings and drawings by Katie Crown comes just in time for the election countdown. Crown has been experimenting with the theme of audiences – of individuals engulfed within a group. Crowds in her colorful paintings and in her black-and-white drawings return the art viewer’s gaze. These are works of the people and for the people, but also commentary about alienation. As Crown worked on audience paintings recently, she contemplated the categorizing of voters who will decide in November about our future. “People get labeled by group,” she noted, “What does an ‘undecided’ person look like, anyway? What about a group of them?”

Everyone has been part of audiences. Viewing Crown’s audiences brings that shared experience to mind. Being part of an audience seems to give people carte blanche to behave any way they choose. At the gallery, though, there’s no need to silence your cell phone and refrain from talking.

Is the individual diminished by becoming subsumed in a group or strengthened by unity with others? Crown’s work explores this visually with the challenge of creating exciting compositions built on faces and clothes of various people in her audiences. Her focus on audiences previously took the form of ceramic sculptures and then film-noir inspired black-and-white paintings. Her current show dazzles with colorful individual fashion choices trellised onto the gridded structure of heads in rows. Crown says, “I love working with patterns,” and the joy of that beams through the tight-knit compositions.

Carol Kleinman – The Secret Life of Windows

TAG Gallery is proud to present The Secret Life of Windows, an exhibition of new photographs of reflections on windows by Carol Kleinman. The reflections, captured in Paris, Amsterdam and New York, are printed on canvas, blurring the line between photography and painting.

In the tradition of many great French photographers, she is an “flâneuse” (stroller). She will walk for hours and not take a single photograph. Kleinman feels she’s on a visual treasure hunt. “I’ll spot a complex reflection on a window, get captivated, and start capturing images. Reflections seduce me by their interplay of fantasy and reality, the symphony of layer upon layer of life... all of it merging and culminating in the very personal moment when I click the shutter of my camera!”

A great deal of the impact of Kleinman’s work stems from the fact that the images actually existed at a specific time and place; they are not creations or manipulations. Kleinman says that were she to “Photoshop” and combine images, that impact would be lost. What you see is what she saw. Her work reveals the tension between abstraction and reality and creates a launching pad from which the viewer can go on a journey and explore deeper personal emotions.