For this exhibition, Trang T. Lê continues a series of paintings titled Threads. As with previous works in the series, the artist draws upon the combined influences of nature and personal experience in her abstract oil paintings. 

Lê navigates an intensely personal space that translates onto her canvases as contrasting formal actions, where meticulous marks float over dense, gestural grounds. The marks range from individual pointilist dots, to tightly massed loops and long, stretching delicate lines. Lê configures her quivering marks into varying formations that impart a sense of the arrested movement of marine life undulating in water, bundles of yarn mounding over one another, streaks of falling water or arid horizons.

The painterly grounds enhance the hand-rendered delicacy of the artist's linework. Lê's heavily layered, often moody spaces, contrasted with the buoyancy of her thread-like delineations, impart a range of emotions from which she draws. Turmoil and grace, strength and vulnerability, intuition and calculation, gravity and weightlessness merge in the impactful oil paintings. For Lê, the term 'thread' works as both a formal framework and a metaphorical reference to personal unraveling and pulling back together.  Within these formal undertakings, Trang finds strength and comprehension in the face of tremendous uncertainties she has faced.  As in her other works, the obsessive delineations are cathartic acts, filtered through personal toil and joyous moments of a personal journey.

 

 

Trygve Faste's work emerges from a response to prevailing currents in consumer culture, architecture, design and technology. These systems, which shape our physical and psychological environment, are explored by Faste through his own language of abstraction. The artist constructs and paints three-dimensional works that suggest a unique interface between industry, fine art and technology. These discordant impulses seamlessly merge in his works through conceptual motivations and formal practices.

Faste shapes and paints his objects using precise geometry and a clean, crisp palette to form a visual kinship with mass-produced, high-tech objects. The compositions, with their acute angulartiy and sheared surfaces, imply a sense of propulsion, speed, precision and utility often associated with products. While the influence of industrial design informs Faste's practice, including the use of Computer Aided Design and laser cutters, the work remains grounded in the realm of abstract painting. The scuptural quality of the stretchers he builds himself, the skillfully fractured planes and intimate grading of paint all counterbalance an initially slick, manmade impression. In this new series, Faste introduces landscape elements, which pushes the merged dynamic of manufactured sensibility with fine art even further.

"This body of work is an exploration into a confluence of an industrially designed culture and the imaginary space possible through paint," Fast states. "These pieces engage the futuristic aspirations of an architecturally and technologically influenced cultural existence... Consumer culture, of which both art and design are integral, necessitates innovation, creativity, style, seduction and manipulation to propagate itself. My work engages these conceptual issues of material creation through an abstract visual language of implied technology and function.

Trygve Faste received an MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2004, and a BA in Mathematics-Computer Science and Studio Art from Whitman College in 1997. Faste's work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, and is in the permanent collections of The Cranbrook Art Museum, Compuware Inc. and Chrysler. Trygve Faste lives and works in Eugene, Oregon where he is an Assistant Professor of Product Design at The University of Oregon.