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July 14 to August 18, 2007
YEVGENIYA BARAS | HAROLD MENDEZImages here
YEVGENIYA BARAS
"Trying on Bodies"
oil on canvas
HAROLD MENDEZ
"Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked" (study)
black silicon carbide, ink on inkjet print
Western Exhibitions' second summer show in the main gallery features two recent graduates from Chicago's most acclaimed MFA programs: Yevgeniya Baras from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Harold Mendez from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Baras' paintings and prints and Mendez' installations, drawings and sculptures touch upon similar themes of personal narrative, globalism, fragmented identities and ennui.
Baras reinterprets personal and family histories that have traveled from continent to continent over time through paint. Her investment in skewed narratives comes from her upbringing in the Soviet Union, where history was a carefully constructed and fiercely guarded concept. In her semi-abstract paintings, delicately rendered lacy patterns and motifs recalling fences and prison cells struggle to contain the fury of passionate swaths and washes of paint. Titles like "Jewish Hell" and "Hugging and Fucking" add to the dynamic, upping the tension between the brutal and tender. Baras states "every story of restraint is a story of rebellion against it. I find a language in painting that states revolt and release. Luscious, gooey stuff ignores boundaries, spilling over the preceding system." She chokes the canvas with paint and repeats her layering of grids and blobs until she has retold the old narrative.
Mendez' installations, drawings and sculptures depicting fences, gates, barriers, corrals and empty landscapes speak to both the metaphysics of the human condition and the to real-world specificity of border politics and global strife. These knotty, difficult issues of citizenship, place, memory and identity are rendered in black silicon carbide, blue marking chalk, clear packing tape, popcorn and natural dyes that are given poetic form by Mendez' deft touch. He employs a cinematic approach in his large wall pieces and drawings in which the viewer is enveloped in the melancholic virtual space of the work. Mendez states “Like scars, my work is to remind us that our past is real and that what counts is to be in the world, even for a brief moment of time”.
Yevgeniya Baras received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007, a MS and BA from the University of Pennsylvania and attended the Slade School of Arts in London as well as the Academy of Fine Arts in Samara, Russia. Her work has been included in shows in Chicago at G2, Contemporary Art Workshop and will be in a group show at Roots and Culture in the fall.
Harold Mendez received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2007. He has an upcoming solo show at Polvo this fall, the site of his much acclaimed solo show, “The Geography of War” in 2005 and will be included in “Consuming War” at the Hyde Park Art Center later this year. His work has been included in group shows at the Commerce Street Warehouse in Houston, vuspace in Australia, the University of North Umbria in the United Kingdom and the University of Science & Technology in Ghana, West Africa.
ALL IMAGES © WESTERN EXHIBITIONS & EACH INDIVIDUAL ARTIST