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Brooks Salzwedel & John Palmer: Modern Soil
Katherine Wilson: Look at me look at you

28 June – 26 July, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 28, 7:00 – 10:30pm

Black Maria Gallery
3137 Glendale Blvd., Atwater Village, CA 90039
Contact, Zara Zeitountsian
(323) 660-9393
Web site, http://www.blackmariagallery.com
E-mail, info@blackmariagallery.com
Hours, Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6pm; and by appointment

Brooks Salzwedel, 2008, resin, graphite and acrylic, 20 x 30".

Black Maria is pleased to announce the opening of "Modern Soil", an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles based artists Brooks Shane Salzwedel and John Palmer. The exhibition builds on the fight-for-life themes consistent in Salzwedel's art - nature vs. man-made, prehistoric vs. modern, organic vs. structured, recalling a time past, while remaining firmly planted in the present. Palmer’s works explores landscapes in peril and gives the exhibition contextual layers of introspection and meaning.

With little more than graphite and resin, Salzwedel creates sublime images of nature and industrial development co-existing.  Creating an eerie, ethereal tension between the two, while challenging notions of beauty and destruction. Salzwedel's process and materials themselves lend additional depth to his content.  The toxic process of the layered resin is initially overshadowed by the beauty of the trees and plant life it contains.

Brooks Shane Salzwedel earned his BFA with distinction from Art Center College of Design in 2004.  In addition to his flourishing art practice, he is the designer and producer of an award-winning line of belt buckles, included in Los Angeles Magazine's 2006 "Best Of" issue.  Salzwedel's art and accessories have also garnered press in Los Angeles Times Magazine West, GQ, LA Confidential, NY Arts Magazine, Lucky, Juxtapoz, and Timeout.

"Modern Soil" will include an exclusive preview of "Landscape Quartet," four new short films from artist and filmmaker John Palmer. The films are works-in-progress, depicting landscapes in crisis, victims to shifts in permanence and scale. Palmer received his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and is a recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation Film Honorarium and the James Broughton Film Award.  His work has been exhibited around the world, including group shows at Pacific Film Archive and Millennium Film Workshop.

Katherine Wilson, "Bonsai" 2008, graphite on paper, 9 x 12".

Black Maria Gallery is also pleased to announce Katherine Wilson’s upcoming show, Look at me look at you. In these works, Katherine explores a unique character and its interaction with the natural world through a series of drawings. 

Eyes belie one’s experience and hold a depth of emotion. These drawings combine an element of the surreal with a natural environment or organic object. Often melancholy, but sometimes mischievous, each picture speaks of a quiet story – a moment of brief interaction between creature and environment suspended in time. The creature morphs and changes how it interacts with its environment, but the eye element remains suggesting that inanimate objects are alive and empathize with their surroundings..

Katherine’s influences include calligraphic line work, anime, Surrealism, chiaroscuro, as well as traditional Dutch painting technique. She has developed a unique style addressing both the abstraction and spatial orientation of forms that suggest creatures or natural phenomena. Trained as an oil painter, Katherine enjoys the spontaneity that drawing provides, as well as the intense detail that can be achieved with graphite. She lives and works in Los Angeles.