I have just finished creating a new website to supplement this blog. Please check it out at www.danielleshelley.com. And if you have comments, let me know by using the Contact form on the new site. Thanks!
“Building the Image,” the Lady Minimalists Tea Society’s upcoming show, opens on April 4 from 5-8 pm at Smink in the Dallas Design District. Dara Mark, Shaun Gilmore, Jill Christian, Signe Stuart, Janice Wall and I will be exhibiting work that makes evident how our art is built of its component parts. We’ll all be at the opening–if you’re in Dallas, please drop by.
Pamphlet for Lady Minimalists SMINK show
Smink is located at 1019 Dragon St., Dallas, TX 75207; 214-350-0542
I am very pleased to be showing in Axle Indoors, the fifth anniversary exhibit of Axle Contemporary, which will open on Friday, February 13, at Peters Projects in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The reception is from 5 to 7 p.m., and the show will run through March 21. Axle Indoors will show work by 150 of the 250 artists who have shown at Axle since the mobile gallery started roaming the streets of Santa Fe five years ago.
The image above shows part of the 9-panel grid I am exhibiting in Axle Indoors. The panels are part of my Blue Gate series of 16 oil paintings on panel, with each panel measuring 14″ x 11.” The only other time Blue Gate has been shown in Santa Fe was at the late lamented Salon Mar Graff in 2009. So this is a rare chance to see some of the work that preceded my current series, Earth Measure Blues.
I showed at Axle Contemporary in September 2013 with the other members of the Lady Minimalists Tea Society. Our exhibit was titled Magnetic Drift (see earlier blog entry).
I hope you can make it to Peters Projects for this show: it should be an amazing gathering of some of the most interesting artists in northern New Mexico.
I am very happy to announce that I am now represented by ViVO Contemporary, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Fourteen outstanding Santa Fe-area artists are represented by ViVO, so I feel like I’m in very good company. The gallery is located at the top of Canyon Road, across from Geronimo’s restaurant. Their address is 725 Canyon Road, and they are open seven days a week. Please check out their website at ViVO Contemporary and their page on Facebook.
The Lady Minimalists Tea Society:
Magnetic Drift
September 6-29, 2013, at Axle Contemporary:
A mobile gallery of contemporary art in Santa Fe
Opening reception: Friday, September 6, 5-7 p.m. in the Santa Fe Railyard (Farmers Market area)
Danielle Shelley, Dara Mark, Diane McGregor
Janice Wall, Shaun Gilmore, Signe Stuart
-
- Magnetic Drift artworks by the Lady Minimalists
-
- Axle’s mobile gallery
Drifting west at the rate of fifty-five miles a year, the magnetic north pole is headed for Siberia, and from there, who knows? Magnetic Drift, an exhibition by the Lady Minimalists Tea Society, is an interactive installation that’s also headed somewhere unknown, depending on the whims of our viewers/collaborators.
In this site-specific project for Axle Contemporary, a mobile gallery of contemporary art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Lady Minimalists have created small works that are moveable and interchangeable. The installation consists of several hundred “tiles”–tiny artworks by the six artists, attached to the walls of Axle’s mobile gallery with magnets. Anyone who enters the truck is invited to move them about and form their own constellation of artworks. A large work can be created with component parts made by one artist or several. A small single work can be a world in and of itself. In the spirit of more openness and flexibility, we are pricing the work at a point that should be affordable for all.
The Lady Minimalists Tea Society is a collective of six Northern New Mexico women artists who have an aesthetic relationship to minimalism as a core principle. For some members, it is a starting point, while for others it is more a concept to react to. Each of them has adapted the minimalist aesthetic to her own individual ends. They retain a shared sense of pared-down processes, materials and/or colors, so that what is left out of the artwork is as crucial as what is allowed in. There is no storytelling; pictorial space is explored abstractly, often with an emphasis on light or atmosphere.
For location information for the mobile gallery after the opening reception, go to Axle’s website: www.axleart.com. For more information about the Lady Minimalists Tea Society: http://www.ladyminimalists.com.com.
On September 6, 2013, Magnetic Drift, a project by the Lady Minimalists Tea Society, will open at Axle Contemporary, Santa Fe’s mobile gallery. The project consists of hundreds of small artworks, each 4×4 in. or smaller, mounted on Axle’s interior walls with magnets. Each of the six of us will put up a grid of her work, and then viewers are invited to move the tiles anywhere they want to make their own compositions. Like the Earth’s magnetic north, the exhibit will drift in unpredictable ways over time–we’re quite curious to see what happens.
Here are a selection of my tiles. I’ve really enjoyed making them: at the end of a painting day, I take leftover oil paint and brush or spread it on small primed masonite panels; after the panels dry, I draw by scratching into the paint. (This project has shown me just how tough dry oil paint is. The tools I use to draw in wet paint aren’t sharp enough to go through dry paint, so I had to buy some etching tools, including a couple tipped with tiny industrial diamonds.)
The tiles will be priced very reasonably, so viewers can afford to take home their compositions.
“Earth Measure Blues 17” (2012), oil on linen, 36 x 54 in. (diptych)
“Earth Measure Blues 18” (2012), oil on linen, 40 x 60 in. (diptych)
“Earth Measure Blues 19” (2013), oil on linen, 30 x 45 in.
I have a beautiful new studio! My husband Bob was the general contractor and lead carpenter. Planning began in May 2012, and I moved in early in 2013. It’s a wonderful space, with lots of storage, a 23-foot-long shelf for looking at work, north light, and even a mountain view from the window over the sink–very nice when washing brushes at the end of a long day.
The studio is to the left of the garage; you can see my wonderful north windows.
I took about a thousand photos during the construction, which Bob boiled down to 27 for a slideshow: www.flickr.com/photos/97632904@N04/
I will be exhibiting at Art Santa Fe, the contemporary art fair, with the Lady Minimalists Tea Society, a collective of seven Santa Fe women artists to which I belong. Please stop by and see us!
Danielle Shelley 