Kim Llerena, Jen Noone
Surface Encounters
Pairing Photography and Painting
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Washington, DC - F O R M E R L Y W A S is pleased to present Surface Encounters, a two-person exhibition featuring photography by Kim Llerena and paintings by Jen Noone.
Please join us for a conversation with the artists on Friday, April 8, 6-7.30pm and for the OPENING RECEPTION on Saturday, April 9, 5-8pm
ABOUT THE ARTWORK
Jen Noone’s paintings are small in scale, and they are not really paintings. Paint is the subject, and it takes on the form of sculpture in Noone’s work. She is interested in the material itself and ideas of materiality, generally. Noone begins her process by collecting leftover latex paint from the hardware store. She takes it home and methodically begins manipulating it. She pours, kneads, scrapes, layers, peels and carves it. She mixes in other water-based paints like craft paint, artist acrylics, and fabric paint. She inks over it. Through a time-based, repetitive, intuitive and inquisitive process, Noone explores what her materials can do when pushed and teased. Her resulting “painting-sculptures” are highly tactile, quirky, and manically particular in their affect.
Kim Llerena’s photographic renderings of the American landscape are more directly cerebral. She is drawn to how we construct a relationship to place, particularly through methods of delineating terrain, territory, and private/public space. Llerena sets out in search of marks made by others: marks of past actions, marks of abandoned ideas. She frames what she encounters - fragments of the American experience - and then connects disparate sites through the formal, structural, and conceptual patterns she finds. Together, her images construct a portrait of a country shaped by invisible systems that manifest themselves in the physical landscape. Llerena’s work is telling and poetic and, like Noone’s, elicits both shared contemplation and an emotional response.
Gallery Address: 4936 Wisconsin Ave NW, Washington, DC 20016
Gallery Hours: Tue-Sat 11am-6pm