Hasta La Ideas

Tiffany Bozic’s stunning paintings showing the emotional side of living creatures

Masterfully melding science with fine art, self-taught painter Tiffany Bozic explores the subtleties of the natural world through her bold and beautifully executed works. Her whimsical illustrations of instinctual behaviors in the wild result in works that at first blush look straightforward, but an up-close view reveals much more complicated dynamics at play. “Confiding To Strangers“—currently on display at the Joshua Liner Gallery in NYC—continues her exploration of how all living things (humans included) relate and live among each other in the wild.

When possible Bozic studies her subjects in their natural habitat, much like her favorite artist John James Audubon. While travels span Papua New Guinea with a bird scientist (who she later married), Namibia, Australia and beyond, when Bozic isn’t in the field she does research at San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences or examines creatures through her digital photographs.

Painting with acrylic on Maple panels or watercolor on paper, Bozic uses her subjects to metaphorically express her emotions. As she explained in a recent video, her painting about sexual selection dubbed “Passion in Paradise” (above right) visually portrays the story of two male animals whose horns got stuck together while fighting over a female. Turning the horns into connected Birds of Paradise, Bozic says the story shows just how powerful the female species can be.

With 31 new works in total, “Confiding To Strangers” is a gorgeously thoughtful exhibit about the numerous complex relationships we have with the living environment. The show is on view at Joshua Liner Gallery through 11 December 2010.

A Minneapolis production company by day and art gallery by night

Runner Runner Gallery, a new art space within a production studio, will open its second show, featuring the recent work of Minneapolis-based artists Brian Lesteberg and James Holmberg. In the heart of the warehouse district, the interdisciplinary venue is a welcomed gesture in the Minneapolis art scene. Next Thursday’s opening for the show, inviting likeminded students and professionals from the film, advertising, and music industries to come together, embodies the ethos of the project. “It’s sort of a party for art,” describes jMatt Keil, Runner Runner’s vice president of business development. “We’re really excited to show our support and to put on a night of great entertainment.”

The show itself positions Holmberg’s large-scale dreamy photographs against selections from Lesteberg’s most recent project, Raised To Hunt, a document of the journey of hunters through northern Minnesota. Many of the photographs show vast expanses of frozen landscape but after a closer look, an impression of either the killer or the killed— whether drops of blood or a silhouetted parka—emerges. Jarring, intentional violence brings with it a deep sense of natural validation for Lesteberg’s hunters. The extreme photographic detail brings to life even the most banal parts of the killing process, a startling honesty that has something in common with fellow Minnesotan Alec Soth’s 8 x 10 field format.

Like Lesterberg’s photographs, Holmberg’s massive canvases take up the entire field of vision, but that’s where the similarity ends. Holmberg’s paintings confront the viewer with a vast wash of minimal color textured with abstract blobs of pigment. Immediately recalling the softly-focus drive-by shots of “Taxi Driver,” Holmberg’s cinematic style makes the production company/gallery venue all the more appropriate. Runner Runner Gallery’s high ceilings and cement floors, don’t hurt either artists’ works either.

Runner Runner shares the space with affiliate companies Fischer Edit/FX and Modern Music. All three post-production companies thrive together within this collaborative workspace. “In some ways,” explains curator Luke Erickson, “Runner Runner seems like a healthier gallery space, not to mention a model for the business of exhibition, than many I’ve visited.”

“It’s not surprising that it would start here,” says Ian Bearce, executive producer at Runner Runner. “When we’re not in the office, we’re deejaying, playing in touring bands, painting, making films. We’re thrilled to find another way to participate in the local scene.”

The show opens this Thursday, November 18 from 6-9pm and runs through the next few months.

Conceptual artist Roy McMakin’s funny furniture gets a hometown show

Roy McMakin‘s furniture designs aren’t the first to take on conventional assumptions about the distinctions between art and objects. As a trained architect, it’s not surprising that the interdisciplinary artist’s skillful manipulation of details rivals that of a legend like Ettore Sottsass. But where Sottsass used his painstakingly deliberate compositions to playfully reinvent ideas about what furniture can be, McMakin’s studied work makes wry observations about what furniture is. As the press release for his current show “Five Chairs & Ten Tables” puts it, McMakin’s absurdist work “emphasize[s] the sculptural quality of utilitarian objects, resulting in works both awkward and irreverent, exuding a presence simultaneously monastic and mischievous.”

This new exhibit sees the Seattle-based artist (he was born in the rural town of Lander, Wyoming) showing in his adopted city at Ambach & Rice. With an installation that consists of a series of furniture mismatched in shape and appearing slightly unfinished or off—cushions are askew, tabletops pitch too far over their pedestals—the work introduces a tension between notions of art and commerce. Here, the chairs and tables perform as “actors suspicious of the role in which they were cast.”

For more of McMakin’s explorations of emotion, scale, craft and function to explore how objects contain meaning, see Rizzoli’s retrospective book “When Is A Chair Not A Chair,” which includes almost all of his prolific output over the past 25 years. As McMakin explains it, “I see the job of an artist as that of a philosopher of visual experience.”

“Five Chairs & Ten Tables” is currently on view through 5 December 2010 at Ambach & Rice. See more images of the exhibit in the gallery below.

Technology and fine art collide in a device bringing museums to the elderly

A Texas-based project, For Love & Art helps the elderly living in hospices enjoy fine works of art during their last days through digital photos. A partnership between art galleries and museums brings thousands of pieces of fine art to Digital Foci‘s eight-inch high-resolution digital LCD notebooks for viewing by those who are no longer able to travel.

Already NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Washington D.C.’s The National Gallery of Art have joined the ranks of image contributors, but organizers are looking to expand the 1000-piece collection.

Dallas’ Touching Our World Foundation is asking for people to donate and spread this program to other hospices. As our population continues to gray, it’s important to think about art and design in the golden years whether it be a quirky paint-dipped cane or a sober assessment of design for future retirement complexes.

Candice Lin’s sculptural illusions and videos taking on racial and gender inequalities

Artist Candice Lin‘s new exhibit “Holograms” uses video and sculpture to challenge the distribution of power among races and genders, exploring the concept of authentic identity.

In her ceramic sculpture “The Moon,” Lin challenges understandings of feminine interiority by requiring audiences to peer through the vulva of a truncated female form in order to watch the animated loop inside. Dubbed “Inside Out,” the animation addresses the old Madonna-vs.-whore cliché.

The exhibit’s namesake, “Holograms,” a twenty-minute video projection montage of found footage and animations, likens identity to a holographic image. Attempting to embody that which can’t be categorized, the ambiguous work incorporates optical illusions, hypnosis and visual contradictions, all to thwart any image of authentic identity.

“Holograms” runs 6 November through 11 December 2010 at L.A.’s Francois Ghebaly Gallery .