Cecilia Paredes | Fugitive Dream
Chris Natrop | Dewdrop Cloud Machine
Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts
October 10 – November 10, 2009
Miami, Florida/ 2009 – Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts is pleased to announce the solo exhibitions of Cecilia Paredes and Chris Natrop during the October Wynwood Art District Second Saturday gallery walk. The opening reception will take place on October 10th from 7:30-10pm. This event is free and open to the public. Exhibitions will be on view through November 10th, 2009.
CECILIA PAREDES | Fugitive Dreams
Cecilia Paredes is a Peruvian artist known for her unique sculpture and photo-performance work. She combines themes of origin, nature and femininity to create a beautifully subtle blend of visual aesthetics, self-introspection and representation. Her artwork is created through the lens of her past and present life experiences, integrated with her cultural, poetic and environmental influences.
Paredes began her fine art education in Lima. Following her studies in Peru, she attended Cambridge School of the Arts and Crafts in the United Kingdom and then completed further studies in Rome. She currently divides her time between Philadelphia and San Jose, Costa Rica, researching and producing her work in both cities. While in Philadelphia, she lectures intermittently at the University of Pennsylvania. She considers San Jose her “home-base” and frequently visits the beautiful tropical forests nearby for inspiration.
Her travels and deep immersion in a variety of cultures have given her a nomadic-like perspective that informs her work. Her itinerant existence is reflected in her art as she wanders, and in a metaphorical sense, portrays her many selves. Paredes is exploring exactly where she fits in with the natural world. In her more recent photo-performance works, she has shifted her focus to feelings about migration and displacement.
Paredes’ work recognizes the inherent relationship between the origins of humanity and the natural world. While her methods and aesthetics have changed, she is largely addressing the same range of issues from origin, to migration, to femininity. Her balance between traditional artistic methods and the incorporation of natural elements creates a genuinely beautiful fusion and contrast between art and nature – where her art always seems to insinuate itself. As much as these images and objects are viewed in a public setting, they retain a sense of privacy or ritualistic secrecy. In the process of creating and interpreting, the artist is seeking a poetic connection to the world. And the art produced through her investigations has created a window into a reality where she expertly delivers to us a simultaneous sense of enchantment and verisimilitude.
An Animal in Her Time, by Ruth Miller and Mark Jew
Project Room
CHRIS NATROP | Dewdrop Cloud Machine
Originally from Milwaukee, Chris Natrop is an installation-artist based in Los Angeles. He earned his BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions and been included in group exhibitions throughout the country. His work has been featured in publications such as Art in America and the New Yorker. Natrop was the 2007 recipient of the Pulse Prize from the Pulse Art Fair in New York.
While known primarily as a cut paper artist, Natrop has begun integrating a variety of other material into his work. Transparent plastics, video projection and multi-channel audio are often employed alongside works of intricate, hand-cut paper to create fully immersive environments within gallery and museum spaces. The viewer is encouraged to enter these room-sized installations to directly experience the realm the artist has set up where elements of light, shadow and form coalesce into a fully unified world. Most of the individual components are hand-cut in the artist’s studio and then custom-arranged for a particular exhibition space. For his works on paper, each piece is spontaneously created without the use of patterns or pre-drawing—this stream-of-consciousness approach is, in fact, the crux of the artist’s practice. Graphic silhouettes emerge from a meditative-channeling activated by the repetitive practice of cutting paper. Natrop works on enormous sheets of Lenox 100 drawing paper stretched out vertically on his studio wall. Wielding a standard utility knife, he spontaneously cuts away at the paper to create a hybrid of landscape imagery. Natrop’s free-form process of “knife drawing” reveals the negative space by removing the emptiness in-between forms. Often an amalgam of things previously observed, the graphic nature of the work becomes a freeze-frame of Natrop’s own direct surroundings revealing the artist’s particular sense of place. In many cases one feature will be multiplied over and over, resulting in a dense layering of a single element. A multiplicity of water droplets, crawling vines or cracks in the pavement may be rendered and reworked within each installation.
Emotional forces further contextualize the work within this structure: feelings of anticipation, apprehension, disorientation or joyfulness often encapsulate the work’s inherently myopic narrative. This fusion between internal, emotional space and the external, physical landscape continue to be the framework for much of Natrop’s practice.
Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts
2043 N Miami Avenue
Miami, FL 33127
www.dlfinearts.com
Hours: Tuesday – Friday 10am – 5pm; Saturday 10am – 3pm
T. 305.576.1804 F. 305.576.1805