530 West 25th Street Chelsea, New York City, NY Tel: 212-226-4151 / Fax: 212-966-4380 www.Agora-Gallery.com / info@Agora-Gallery.com 530 West 25th Street Chelsea, New York City, NY Tel: 212-226-4151 / Fax: 212-966-4380 www.Agora-Gallery.com / info@Agora-Gallery.com 38 ArtisSpectrum
DONNA K. MCGEE Cranberry Hill Acrylic on Canvas 38”x 48” Artist and art educator Donna K. McGee creates acrylic paintings in the American abstraction tradition, confounding impressions of depth or spatial definition. Using a sometimes bold but generally muted palette of earth and rust tones, her paintings evoke surfaces marked by the passage of time. McGee’s manipulation of acrylic creates simultaneous illusions of flatness and experience: colors grow into each other; planes are inscribed with abrasions and fissures. She thereby carries the project of abstraction beyond the abolishment of figure and background. Instead, McGee subverts the surface of the canvas and evokes crumbling, peeling and fraying materials. Where different planes meet and surfaces seem scratched or rusted, her paintings inscribe abstract art in the cycles of history. Her surfaces’ initial calm betrays the possibility of implosion; that these façades will give way to the unknown beneath. To say that Donna K. Mc- Gee’s works are history paintings would be an exaggeration, but they are certainly abstractions with a historical awareness. Website: www.Art-Mine.com/ArtistPage/Donna_McGee.aspx MARIKA BERLIND Red Hole Oil on Canvas 48”x 48” Layers in nature are not something one often takes into account. But Susan Eck defines the strata of her environment into entities that Violet River Oil on Canvas 24”x 36” a r e s e p a r a t e yet inseparable, contagious in beauty and color. Using her genuine excitement, sensitivity, and simplification of nature as more than an artistic device, Eck establishes a complex relationship between viewer and view, as well as between foreground and background and the space in-between. Her wide pallet of color is often used as a multimedia-like element and the bold contrasts she employs work like the medium of collage: each layer stands out from and cooperates with the next. Her landscapes are never two-dimensional in the physical or the emotional sense. In Muskoka, Canada, Eck immerses herself in the nature she translates onto her canvas. In her playfulness with the textures of her environment, Eck creates a new reality which she interprets with distinction and insight as if into the layers of our own lives. Website: www.susaneck.ca SUSAN ECK An artist with U.S. and Greek nationalities, based in San Francisco, Marika Berlind has found a way to combine her love for Astronomy and Mathematics with her love for Art, both of which she studied in her university years at Princeton, RISD and Yale. Berlind’s goal is to present various interpretations of astrophysical-cosmological and mathematical concepts, in order to reveal their visual, theoretical, and philosophical implications. She wishes to provide an alternate means by which to explore science, through a momentary visual experience of ‘living in the universe’; or, of living in that indefinable space between the universe and our earth, our ‘selves’. She is interested in issues of ‘vastness’, ‘the infinite’, ‘chaos’, ‘multidimensionality’, ‘parallel spaces’, and the ‘relative role of Earth and human consciousness within the Universe’. She hopes to open a door for the questioning of our role as observers in our formation of scientific ‘truth’. Berlind believes that ‘talent’ is more a matter of mind than hand, and is cultured through education and analytical thinking. She hopes her art will stand out for the original, intellectual and aesthetic treatment of her subject matter. Deeply connected with her subject, she aspires to contribute to bringing science to art and art to science. “...We are literally made of the dust of stars. The universe is beyond our reach and awesome to our minds; but it is also ‘us’...” Website: www.marikaberlind.com www.Art-Mine.com/ArtistPage/Marika_Berlind.aspx 39 ArtisSpectrum