PLACING COLOR

Works by
Brett Baker
Kayla Mohammadi
Carrie Patterson

September 4 – October 2, 2008

Painting, the simple means of placing color on a flat surface, is extraordinary in its ability to transport us from the context of our daily existence to new places - complete, vibrant worlds within the boundaries of the rectangle. Beyond its traditional role as a place of illusion, the painted surface itself is a location, a destination defined by the artist's actions upon it.

Placing Color is an exhibition that explores painting as both a place of action and a destination. The exhibition presents paintings by three artists: Brett Baker, Kayla Mohammadi, and Carrie Patterson. Seen together their intensely individual approaches create places that are both intimate and immense, unified by a sensitivity to the means of painting – touch and color.

Brett Baker's work explores painting as a place of interaction and repose where the artist's (and by extension the viewer's) presence completes the work. In his smaller paintings, densely layered over time, a balance of color and mark denies deep space – achieving a presence not unlike a portrait– an abstract gaze that activates the space between viewer and work.

The artist's recent large paintings approach a scale normally reserved for sculpture and architecture. Each painting presents a single color on a vast scale. Though mural-sized, these works retain the intimacy of easel painting. Installed facing the wall, the viewer must actively enter the space of the painting, immersing himself or herself in color which seems to project outward – itself inhabiting the space between painted surface and gallery wall.

Working from observation – landscape, interior, or still life – Kayla Mohammadi seeks visual translation rather than literal portrayal in her paintings. Influenced by her dual Finnish and Persian heritage, her work seeks the unexpected place we encounter through sudden, fresh juxtapositions of form and color. In Mohammadi's paintings, memory, formal elements, and observation are competing energies that coalesce, asking us familiar questions: Can I walk into this space? Do I want to? Am I standing on solid ground, being pushed away, or finally stepping through to a new place?

Carrie Patterson's paintings and collages investigate the tension between the memory of architectural spaces and the space of painterly process. Her work questions whether the physicality of a painting or collage can be representative of space without illusion. Influenced by architecture where light plays on structure and material, her recent work experiments with boxes that house reflective

objects such as prisms. Patterson videotapes the prisms' reflections, edits and loops the footage, and projects the video on her studio wall as subject matter for painting. Patterson works on many canvases at once, altering the arrangement of line, shape and color in subtle degrees, much like a choreographer would alter a repetitive action across a stage.