MAGIC

 

MAGIC

APRIL 27 - JUNE 15, 2018

click here to download press release

Opening Reception
Friday, April 27, 2018
7:00 - 10:00 PM
free and open to the public // exhibiting through june 15, 2018

MAGIC : APRIL 27 - JUNE 15 | Kai Lin Art is excited announce our third exhibition of 2018: MAGIC, featuring new artwork from Larry Jens Anderson, Greg Noblin, Kevin Palme and Andrew Catanese. Each of these artists work in a range of mediums from painting and drawing to photographic illustration. The artists of MAGIC draw inspiration from a fantastical world of imagination and inspiration. Featuring refreshing and vibrant imagery, MAGIC is the perfect exhibition to start Spring. 

Larry Jens Anderson, a longtime artist of the gallery and lauded Professor of Art at SCAD and the Atlanta College of Art has been an inspiration and mentor for many artists over his multi-decade art career. Anderson takes over our Grey Gallery for MAGIC with an experimental collection of paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Themes and motifs of illusions, alternate realities, death and politics weave through the body of work which explores the magic of illusion from making things appear where there was once emptiness. Much of the work challenges the viewer to consider how the unexplainable can continually occur. Though the subject matter may vary, Anderson’s concept of pulling things out of the void remains the same. 

Photographer and photo manipulation wizard Greg Noblin returns to the gallery with a new collection of his trademark panelist works. Drawing inspiration from twilight hours and liminal, the transitory space in Noblin’s images are simple and beautiful. Curious animals and quiet spaces find their way through the night sky and magically transport the viewer to a place of tranquil introspection. Noblin has been working as an artist and photographer since the early 2000’s and recently won International Photographer of the Year. 

Based in Asheville North Carolina, painter Kevin Palme brings his larger scale still life to Atlanta for MAGIC. Rendered with incredible technique, the ice cubes of Palme’s oil paintings dance between abstraction and photo realism allowing for considerations of the form and color as well as the life-like, temporary quality in each of the ice cubes. Palme’s cubes are frozen in state of rest but leaping out of the canvas with truly magical effects. The reflected images are visible in the melted foreground and the serene hues shift and change as the viewer moves through each piece.

Andrew Catanese developed a body of work that engages in a process of myth making. The paintings adapt vignettes from Dante’s Inferno and places them in landscapes along the Chattahoochee River. Encounters with coyote and deer in the dark woods and along the liminal space of the river hold intrinsic symbolism akin to formal narratives like those in Dante’s epic poem. The works, through the incorporation of Dante’s writing, critically address archaic moral dogmas whose arbitrary values have never reflected the complexity of the human condition. Catanese imbues these places with myth and magic as a way to discuss how people form a sense of who they are and their moral systems based upon their surroundings. In doing so, the landscapes become important parts of a person’s identity as they learn and construct mythologies.