Daphne Arthur & Shanga Manning
January 5 - February 2

RARE is pleased to announce Poetics of Reverie, an exhibition curated by Daphne Arthur that features new artwork by her and introduces the drawings of Shanga Manning. The show, which runs from January 5 through February 2, marks Arthur's second exhibition at the gallery and Manning's first.

Arthur and Manning cover similar conceptual ground in that their work mines the nostalgia of recreated memories. They believe specific remembered events, especially those of childhood, are life-defining moments that have the ability to influence one's adult life based on their poignancy, specificity, and tendency to seem present upon their recounting. 

Because memories are also a minefield of psychological complications, the recollection of them allows both artists constantly to re-imagine, re-invent, and re-enact these moments. Thus, the process of continually recalling or daydreaming about a past event can eventually result in an altered refrain or copy of the original that may be an idealized version of the truth - a summation of what the artist wants us to see rather than a blow-by-blow retelling of what literally took place.

Arthur's exploration of memory takes form in a variety of unusual combinations of mediums that have become her calling card for grabbing viewers' attention and pulling them in. Invoking her own personal remembrances of love, leisure, and hero worship, she has sculpted figures directly onto her canvases so that her narratives literally and figuratively spring to life. The result is that Arthur's recollections feel immediate and present, as though they are being lived in the present. Her recent series of drawings made by holding paper over a smoking candle feel of another time and place that is both timeless and placeless. Here memory seems to travel both backward and forward from the original event to explore notions of identity and self-worth in women who, like her, are of multi-ethnic heritage.

Manning creates large-scale graphite drawings on paper, where images that revive childhood memories are faint, ethereal, even vaporous, coming in and out of focus depending on viewers' orientation vis-à-vis the work. His technique has a mimetic relationship to memory in that it is both additive and reductive. He draws the original image on paper - utilizing family members to re-enact his most memorable childhood moments - only to extensively erase it while maintaining a very faint trace of the image over which he will then shade in delicate layers of graphite. What viewers experience are wraith-like renderings of childhood recollections. Manning's process relates directly to his attempt to recreate the visual behavior of memory. Memories that are more diaphanous are rendered in images that are lighter than those of memories that are easier to recall.

Arthur received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2009. She has been the recipient of several awards including the Prismacolor Premier Contest Award in 2004 and the Federation of Independent Illinois Colleges and Universities Award in 2005. Arthur was the Al Held Affiliate Fellow of the American Academy of Rome in 2009. This year she exhibited in the Florence Biennale in Italy.

Manning received a BA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in 2006 and his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2011. He was the recipient of the Senior Sankofa Award at the University of North Carolina in 2006 and the Excellence in Fine Arts Award given by Utrecht Art Supplies in 2011. Manning participated in multiple group exhibitions in 2011, including shows at Sotheby's Auction House, the New York Academy of Art, Alix Sloan Gallery, Times Square Gallery, and Forbes Gallery, all in New York. He also exhibited in Made in New York, a one-person show at Fredrikstad Art Association in Fredrikstad, Norway.

Aaron Holz
September 8 - October 6

RARE Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of A Heart's Hot Shell, an exhibition of new paintings by the artist Aaron Holz. The show, which runs from September 8 through October 6, marks Holz's third solo turn at the gallery.

The title of the exhibition is taken from Chapter 41 of Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, which references Captain Ahab's obsessive quest for the great white whale in the following sentence: "He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it." For Holz, a similar desire exists at the threshold of each new work. His search often leads him along unexpected paths, as if he were unconsciously letting the painting direct itself, allowing it to expand and contract, to move back and forth among its divergent layers of gesso, acrylic, oil, and resin so that figures, foreground, background, colors, textures, and space find an equilibrium.

Holz samples imagery of past practitioners such as Goya and Darger and combines it with found contemporary images of wrestlers, sunbathers, floral arrangements, and wooded forests that he subjects to substantial alteration during the painting process. The results are jewel-like works brimming with desire and longing for a world that has been rendered illusory through unusual juxtapositions of subject matter, heightened and saturated colors, and vertiginous spatial arrangements.

That the artist's paintings suggest an improbable though desirous world is amplified by his process of beginning each work with layers of acrylic applied over a raked gesso ground, which Holz then covers with thin layers of resin to lend a physical depth and luminosity to the surface. The raked ground, visible through the applications of acrylic and resin, acts in some instances as a contour to help build form while in other situations its physicality is in marked contrast to the flat images rendered in oil on top of the resin surface. The diverse nature and utilization of mediums pushes the paintings toward the realm of abstraction, further suggesting an imagined world.

Holz obtained his MFA from the University at Albany, SUNY, in 2001, and has received a number of awards including the Nebraska Arts Council Distinguished Artist Award and the Harold & Esther Edgerton Assistant Professor of Painting Award. He is currently an Associate Professor of Painting at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. In 2010-11, he participated in exhibitions at various venues including the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; the University Art Museum, Albany, NY; the Rourke Art Museum, Moorhead, MN; and the Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney, NE. 

Eamon O'Kane
October 13 - November 10

RARE Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Eamon O'Kane titled There Is Another World, But It Is In This One. The show, which will run from October 13 to November 10, marks the artist's second solo turn at the gallery.

The exhibition's title is an allusion to a quote by W.B. Yeats which O'Kane references in his work. His paintings and drawings serve as a visual allegory to the quote's written implication to expose one's childhood and heritage in one's work. The show portrays an autobiographical world in the manner ascribed to by Yeats, who in a related way attempted to express his Irish upbringing in the context of British colonial rule. O'Kane's work stands as an investigation into the inherent influences on the creative side of his life, ranging from art and design to mathematics and engineering. The entire range of his output can be seen as a self-examination of the cumulative influences on his artistic method and conceptual development.

The effects that architects, designers, and educators have had on O'Kane's growth are manifest in his paintings, drawings, installations, sculptures, and animations. His work is a marriage of his signature draftsmanship, design, and painterly qualities and the pragmatic yet creative forms and designs of his Modernist predecessors. Innovators such as Friedrich Fröbel, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Charles Eames are integrated into the artist's oeuvre as a reflective form of self-analysis. O'Kane riffs on the achievements of master architects such as Wright and Philip Johnson by adding his own sensibility in the form of surreal landscaping and saturated, keyed-up colors. He also makes direct visual reference to Fröbel's educational play materials known as Fröbel Gifts, which include geometric building blocks and pattern activity blocks that were inspirational to Wright, Le Corbusier, Eames, and Mondrian. He pays particular homage to the architectural eccentricities and peculiarities of the home in which he was raised in County Donegal and singles out Irish furniture designer and pioneer Modernist architect Eileen Gray.

O'Kane has participated in numerous solo and group shows worldwide. His work is included in Dublin Contemporary 2011, September 6 - October 31, 2011, at Earlsfort Terrace and four partner locations in and around Dublin (The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, The National Gallery of Ireland, and The Royal Hibernian Academy). He is also exhibiting in The 43 Uses of Drawing, September 6 - October 30, 2011, at Rugby Art Gallery and Museum in Rugby, UK. O'Kane contributed a site-specific wall drawing and animations to the Luleå Art Biennial 2011 in Sweden, June 22 - September 14, 2011. In 2012, he will have three one-person exhibitions: Neues Museum, Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design, Nürnberg, Germany; Klaipėda Culture Communication Center, Klaipėda, Lithuania; and 126 Gallery, Galway, Ireland. In 2009, the artist made his US solo debut at RARE, followed in 2010 by a one-person exhibition at The Atrium at 101 California in San Francisco, an office tower designed by Philip Johnson, and a solo turn at Gregory Lind Gallery also in San Francisco. A 120-page monograph on his work, entitled Case Histories, with text by Dan Cameron, formerly of the New Museum in New York, was published in 2009. Details on O'Kane's extensive exhibition, review, and publication history can be found at www.eamonokane.com.

O'Kane received a B.A. Joint Honours Degree in History of Art and Fine Art Painting from The National College of Art and Design in Dublin in 1996, and a Master of Fine Arts Degree from Ulster University in Belfast in 1998. In addition to being the recipient of several fellowships and lecturing positions, O'Kane is currently Professor of Visual Arts at Bergen National Academy of Art in Bergen, Norway.

Tim Maxwell
November 17 - December 22

RARE is pleased to announce an exhibition of new pen & ink drawings by Tim Maxwell entitled Weltschmerz. The show, which runs from November 17 through December 22, marks the artist's second solo turn at the gallery.

Underpinning Maxwell's work is the German concept of "Weltschmerz" - psychological pain caused by the sadness that occurs upon realizing one's own weaknesses are caused by the inappropriateness or cruelty of the world. The mindset implied by this term defines the journey Maxwell has endured in order to resurface as a working artist years after thinking he would never again pick up a pen to draw.

Like Renaissance and Baroque Period artists, Maxwell finds inspiration in Greek and Roman mythological figures, which he "un-constructs" or flays and then reconstitutes in a style that uniquely melds street and tattoo art. Through this process, he heightens the figures' allegorical implications of timeless sorrow that parallel his own feelings of personal distress and anguish.

Spending nearly sixteen hours a day standing in front of a single wall in his studio, Maxwell laboriously draws in a nearly miniaturist manner. He works each piece just short of its "breaking point" so that the integrity of his highly complex imagery is retained. Every mark becomes its own internal space, each bundle of lines a mini-vignette or landscape, each plane its own world, with the whole evolving into a cosmology of interconnected parts.

Maxwell received an MFA in 2004 from the School of Visual Arts in New York and a BFA in 2002 in Painting and Drawing from Pennsylvania State University. He has had solo shows at Derek Eller Gallery (New York) and Marvelli Lab (Brooklyn). His drawings are currently the subject of a one-person exhibition, titled TABULA RASA, at Charest-Weinberg Gallery in Miami. Maxwell's first solo show at RARE took place in 2006.