Painting
Group Show, Ruth
Bachofner gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Avenue, G2 Santa Monica,
CA 90404 February 28, 2009 through April 11, 2009
In the Wave
Of my Eyes an exhibition of new paintings by April Street
November 1, 2008 through December 18, 2008
at The Arts Co, 215 fifth Ave. North Nashville TN 37291
Foreign
and Domesticated, Solo at Ruth Bachofner Gallery,
Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Avenue, G2 Santa Monica, CA 90404 January
19, 2008 through March 1, 2008
The Dominant Planets
Of
High Energy Constructs in Chinatown Los Angeles presents
The Dominant Planets Of - a group exhibition of paintings and drawings by
Searcy Benson, Kadar Brock, Kent Hammond, Paola Ochoa, and April Street. The
Dominant Planets Of brings together five emerging artists who work with extraordinary
freedom, mixing ideology and tradition, as well as engaging with archetypal
and personal dialogues of social, political, and art historical concern.
April 7 - May 12, 2007
Exhibitions:
-----May 17, 2013 - June 8, 2013
Object implied
Kris Chatterson
Dave Hardy
Ryan Roa
April Street
Robert Thiele
Odalis Valdivieso
Emerson Dorcsh Gallery 151 NW 24th Street, Miami, FL 33127
May 17, 2013 - June 8, 2013
Opening reception May 17, 2013, 6 p.m. - 9 p.m.
-----May 25th-June 22, 2013
A point of view of a Cat
opening reception: Saturday May 25th 7-11pm
Animatron
176-B Barranca st.
(at San Fernando and Barranca)
Los Angeles CA 90031
ph. 213 219 9514
-----February 15-May 31 2013 Millenial Abstraction Group Exhibition curated by Patricia Watts. Marin Community Foundation, Novato, CA
-----January 12- February 23 2013 Forms of Abstraction curated by Carl Berg. Irvine Fine Art Center 14321 Yale ave. Irvine CA 92604
-----September 8, 2012-October 20, 2012
April Street. Portraits and Ropes.
Carter & Citizen 2648 La Cienega Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90034
Recent Press:
Art In America-review by Danielle Sommer. December 2012 print issue. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/april-street/
Art Forum-critics pick by Annie Buckley http://artforum.com/picks/section=la&mode=past#picks34603
LA Weekly-5 Artsy Things to do by Catherine Wagley- 1. Intimacy Issues http://blogs.laweekly.com/arts/2012/09/carter_citizen_jancar_gallery.php
Huffington Post- Art and the Feminine Mystique: this artweek October 1 2012- by Bill Bush http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-bush/this-artweekla-october-1_b_1936567.html
LA Weekly- quoted- by Catherine Wagley-http://www.laweekly.com/2012-10-04/art-books/paul-schimmel-moca-destroy-the-picture/
Artweek.LA- weekly pick- by Bill Bush http://artweek.la/issue/october-1-2012/article/april-street-portraits-and-ropes
"April
Street's paintings thrive on layering, a single painting offers an eclectic
set of references including Arturo Herrera,... Helen Frankenthaler, Crisp lines
of bulbous cartoon characters become semi transparent abstractions. The repetitious
whipping of vines reference digital responces to the stylized flora of Art Nouveau.
This Lush mania is placed over a ground of soft stains."- Christopher Russell,
Artillery Magazine,vol 1 no. b summer 2007
2010
exhibitions:
October
1 -October 29. 2010 Slocumb Gallery Group
Show East Tennessee State University.
March
2, 2010 through April 18, 2010
Contemporary Women's Exhibition Curated by Terri Jordan, Customs House Museum
April 3-May 1, 2010 opening
reception 6-9 pm Souvenirs from Spinning at The
Arts,Nashville TN
Twenty -Two Women March 12-
April 23, 2010, Curated by John Buckland. Group Exhibition for the
Susan G. Komen Foundation
Here Now,
Artra Curatorial Invitational Exhibition Curated by Max Presneill,
Torrence Museum November 14, 2010 11500 Tennessee Ave. Los
Angeles
2009:
Sunken Living Room. Ruth Bachofner
Gallery. Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Avenue, G2 Santa Monica, CA. a solo
exhibition of new paintings by April Street. October
24, 2009 through November 21, 2009.
NY Arts Magazine January/February
2009 issue wrote about my paintings in the article: Shape-Shifting
by R. B. Saul.
.http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=376731&Itemid=757
April Street’s paintings bubble
over like an interpretation of lyrics, made richer by years of poetic flexibility
and lubricous perceptions. Her paintings embed watercolor bloom effects that
appear to be dredged through gauzy light, reminiscent of a 70s album cover,
fashioned by a transported courtly Fleming on acid. These trippy surfaces
connote a cut-and-paste methodology, and yet, are an intricate record of her
impressions. By simultaneously combining macro and micro perspectives, Street’s
psychedelic organizations become an elastic maze of diverse configurations.
These configurations form and disinform her imaginative landscapes through
her codependent patchworks and shape-shifting narratives.
Even as her colors boldly depart from naturalism, Street’s illusory
plots and plights consistently concoct objects tangible and figurative, yet
heterarchical—not hierarchal—making them irreducible to abstraction.
Comprised of intimations, mysterious personal allusions, mirages, and movements,
each painting is drizzled with familiarity and mystery, unfolding and dissolving
over time, slipping through the grasps of rational comprehension. Within the
convergence of figure and space, fact, and interpretation, Street takes the
peculiarities of paint and boils it all down to an intimate flurry, a whirlpool
of hypnotic defects, willing to ambulate freely through unrelated perspectives.
Looking
at Street’s watercolor paintings is like being in the Fantastic Voyage,
where you have become tiny and are traveling through the plasma, lymph and transcellular
fluids. Membranes give way to sheaths that glimmer translucent fibers. Space
opens up to reveal the plains that are journeyed across to reach filaments and
fibers. Color and shape are contained in continents of detail while sheer curtains
of color stretch into space. There is a memory within the images that is not
captured with words, but is with a visceral response. Tracey Harnish.
LA Art Diary. 2011
Feb 12 - Mar 12. 2011
Patrick Nickell & April Street. Rosamund Felsen Gallery. Santa
Monica. CA. Opening reception Feb. 12. 2011. 5-7pm.
With her own physical movements realized and indexed in paint, April
Street makes works that evoke the surrealist automatism of a dreamscape.
At the same time, they represent a spontaneous outpouring of social, historical
and personal constructions of romanticized subjects and subject matter. Using
canvases often imprinted with pattern and natural imagery, and utilizing such
varied applications and techniques as paint spills, illusionistic detailing,
prismatic color and floral motifs, Street has largely relinquished the paintbrush.
Instead, she utilizes her own body as well as worn bed sheets to move paint
around the canvas. Displaying a skillful lightness of touch, Who
threw the sunset at Me culminates as a series of beautiful,
highly mysterious and highly allusive paintings, rich in layered meaning.
Recent
exhibitions:
Carter & Citizen is proud to present April Street Portraits and Ropes, the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery. A reception for the artist will take place on September 8, 2012 from 6 pm until 9 pm. The exhibition runs through October 13, 2012.
The paintings included in Portraits and Ropes are a fictional familial construct that overlap, rebel against, and conform to their relatives and their imagined lovers through body language, compositions of movement, and color deposits that create a "generational aesthetic". The gravitational configurations evoke ideas of skin and duration, posturing and adaptation, packaging and labor, as well as action paintings' relationship to feminism. Street's palette is plucked from fantasy art and impressionist landscapes combined with skin mimicking textiles as the paintings drape and extend onto the walls of the gallery via corsage pins and copper tacks. Some paintings within the exhibition are spun into ropes ending in cast bronze knots where they meet the wall, These spun paintings act as strands of DNA that would unravel without the weight of their fixtures.
The paintings begin with a performative act we are not allowed to witness, wherein the artist wraps herself in hosiery materials to enact a series of body positions (recorded while sleeping) into pools of paint on canvas. The impression made by this act is rinsed away while the paint is still wet, where then the memory of the gesture is painstakingly repainted by the artist. The result is the intuitive stippling of her ideal fantasy of what happened in the original. Street's labor and fantasy life then create yet another fiction when it is physically covered. The hosiery, once used as the brush in the beginning of her process, is now the subject in control of its own history. Hidden underneath the folds of hosiery is an image that Street only teases us with knowing fully. These veils of fabric become their sole identity inside the gallery space and outside the protective world of the studio. What begins with the artist's private performances ends with the psychological construction of public image.
The work within the exhibition addresses adaptation of an intimate activity placed in a public space. Posturing and social awkwardness, sexual identity and the hiding of labor to feed particular social longings are all tied up in the painting's reactions to each other. Street alludes to the shifting relationships between objects of action, while acknowledging the identity shifts and role-play that occur when one takes their art from private to public. This tension between object, narrative, and illusion is a constant in Portraits and Ropes. The paintings reverse and reconnect their roles in their ultimate incarnation for the gallery, as a community of gestures, packaged for their public moment.
April Street studied at The Art Institute of Chicago and in central Italy learning traditional bronze casting. She received an NEA project grant for her video collaboration, Imaging Appalachia. Her paintings were the focus of a recent solo exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica, CA and she was chosen by Julie Joyce, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, as one of the 13 LA Artists for the 2012 Baker's Dozen IV Exhibition at the Torrance Art Museum. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Carter & Citizen 2648 La Cienega Ave. Los Angeles CA 90034
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm and by appointment
213.359.2504
Whitney Carter director
http://carterandcitizen.com/
