What are you doing this weekend? Why not join Thinkspace Projects for the opening of new exhibitions by Esao Andres, Marie-Claude Marquis, Amy Sol, and Brad Woodfin? Step into a creative universe where narratives come to life, inviting you, the curious observer, to blend your imagination and interpretation for an experience that is truly extraordinary. Layers of symbolism and texture beckon you to unravel their deeper meanings as you wander about the refreshing, dreamlike compositions. From witty relatable quips and ethereal musings to fantastical landscapes and fine art animal figures, each collection creates a visual feast for the mind. So take a moment of respite and lose yourself in the tapestry of each artist’s vision.
If you’re still looking to be inspired, Thinkspace Projects also offers a full schedule of events, interviews, and much more to keep you and your creative needs fully immersed. Be sure to follow their blog Sour Harvest to stay updated on all the artsy things you love! With just a few clicks, you can browse through an extensive selection of art. Take a moment and visit Thinkspace Projects’ online store to view all available inventory, created by talented artists from around the world!
Thinkspace Projects Presents
Esao Andres, Marie-Claude Marquis, Amy Sol, Brad Woodfin
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4, 2024 | 6-10pm
with DJ, refreshments, live painting, video projections and more
Exhibition Dates: May 4, 2024 – May 25, 2024
Thinkspace Projects
4207 W. Jefferson Blvd. | 4217 W. Jefferson Blvd. | Los Angeles, CA 90016
#310.558.3375 | Tues. – Sat. Noon to 6PM
thinkspaceprojects.com
For all inquiries please contact the gallery via email at contact@thinkspaceprojects.com
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About the Thinkspace Projects //
Thinkspace Projects was founded in 2005; now in LA’s burgeoning West Adams District, the gallery has garnered an international reputation as one of the most active and productive exponents of the New Contemporary Art Movement. Maintaining its founding commitment to the promotion and support of its artists, Thinkspace Projects has steadily expanded its roster and diversified its projects, creating collaborative and institutional opportunities all over the world. Founded in the spirit of forging recognition for young, emerging, and lesser-known talents, the gallery is now home to artists from all over the world, ranging from the emerging, mid-career, and established.
The New Contemporary Art Movement, not unlike its earlier 20th Century counterparts like Surrealism, Dada, or Fauvism, ultimately materialized in search of new forms, content, and expressions that cited rather than disavowed the individual and the social. The earliest incarnations of the Movement, refusing the paradigmatic disinterest of “Art” as an inaccessible garrison of ‘high culture’, championed figuration, surrealism, representation, pop culture, and the subcultural.
By incorporating the ‘lowbrow,’ accessible, and even profane, an exciting and irreverent art movement grew in defiance of the mandated renunciations of “high” art. Emerging on the West Coast in the 90’s partly as a response to the rabid ‘conceptual-turn’ then championed on the East Coasts, the Movement steadily created its own platforms, publications, and spaces for the dissemination of its imagery and ideas.
ESAO ANDREWS, Beetle Shell (Gallery I)
Thinkspace is pleased to present ‘Bettle Shell’, the first solo exhibition of new work from Esao Andrews in just over five years. Having worked together since 2008, and following his mid-career museum retrospective at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum, this show is a bit of a homecoming and we are so excited for his fans to experience this new collection of paintings.
‘Bettle Shell’ features twenty new iconic works by Andrews. Staging a world of unlikely combinations and unexpected tensions, Esao revels in the surreal elasticity of the subconscious and its penchant for the poetically absurd. No hybrid is too unimaginable, no character too fantastic, no anthropomorphous invention too unthinkable. Objects, animals, and people are all dynamically animate and sentient, subject to the inexplicable rules of their living fictional cosmos.
Always one for compelling epilogues, Andrews has revisited past characters and themes throughout his career, building on earlier works and weaving a sort of narrative continuity throughout his output. Though the tone of his imagery often borders on the grotesque or even macabre, a literary impulse links Andrews’ works to the fabric of fable and myth, its folkloric threads binding it to something vaguely archetypal and collective in its haunting resonance.
Statement on the new ‘Battle Shell’ series from Esao:
In this new body of work I’m sharing relics from an imagined world, playing on the scale of little lives and big lives coexisting. The title refers to a scarab beetle’s shell as both a piece of jewelry and as a pinned specimen in a case. Maybe the thought of an Egyptian Pharaoh or a science research library comes to mind or a thought about the little life the beetle had too.
Several pieces stand out as isolated monuments preserved like tiny fossils. Human pastimes now represented as ornaments on display.
About Esao Andrews:
Japanese American artist, and Mesa AZ native, Esao Andrews is known the world over for his minutely detailed and narratively suggestive paintings. Esao brings haunting imagery to life through his uniquely mannerist distortion of subjects, both human and animal, and the strange undertow of his desolate, Gothically inspired landscapes. Themed around homecomings, departures, and afflictive transformations, Andrews’ works feel drawn from the same collective imaginary reserves as myth.
Andrews lists diverse sources of inspiration for his work, everything from art history to skate counterculture. The immersive manga fantasies of anime master Hayao Miyazaki figure prominently among his influences, as do French 19th-Century Academic painting styles, particularly its neoclassical revisitation of myth and the tenebrous cast of its moody contrasts. Andrews also cites the heightened emotional drama of Gustav Klimt’s Symbolist Art Nouveau style and Egon Schiele’s Expressionistic sensual grotesque as other stylistic sources.
Contemporary painters James Jean and Inka Essenhigh list among his inspirations too, as does visionary cartoonist Al Columbia for his masterful, ghoulish reinterpretations of Americana.
Esao attended New York’s School of Visual Arts where he studied illustration and completed a B.F.A in 2000. An accomplished figurative painter, he participated in the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2002. The artist has worked commercially in tandem with his fine art practice which has, in recent years, grown to include large-scale murals, and produced iconic album cover artwork for American rock band Circa Survive. He has also created numerous comic book covers for DC’s Vertigo Comics, and memorable deck designs for Deathwish and Baker Skateboards.
MARIE-CLAUDE MARQUIS, Something Light (Gallery II)
Born in 1983, Marie-Claude Marquis is a Canadian artist whose multi-disciplinary practice touches upon both graphic design and visual arts. Her work focuses particularly on nostalgia, everyday life, pop culture and her own emotions, which she expresses with her feminine touch and a colorful sensitivity.
In her work, the artist particularly appreciates the reappropriation of old objects by whip-smart typographic hand interventions. By giving these antiques a second life, she wants to prolong their existence and reduce her own environmental impact. Pattern, graphic and space designs are as well a big part of her practice.
The result of this mix is often humorous, sometimes irreverent but always maintains a great concern for aesthetics.
About Marie-Claud Marquis:
Montreal based creative Marie-Claude Marquis’ practice touches upon visual arts, graphic design and installation. A holder of a certificate in Fine Arts and Media from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Marquis has exhibited in contemporary art galleries around the world.
Her work has been featured in prestigious publications such as Vogue (Portugal), Jesus NOW (Abrams Books), It’s A Passion Thing Magazine (Austria), and Frankie Magazine (Australia) and can be found in numerous corporate, private and public collections locally and internationally, including the permanent collection of the Musée Pointe-à-Callière (Montreal).
AMY SOL, Dear Creatures (Gallery III)
Amy Sol’s poetically measured images retain traces of melancholic pause in spite of their idyllic beauty and calm, feeling at times like the magic of fairytale tempered by the ambivalence of the adult. Personal and simultaneously universal, the powerful quiet of her works forces a reflective distance into an otherwise unmanageably chaotic visual world.
Sol’s graphic and illustrative inspirations are drawn from enduring collective influences. Everything from animation to decorative design makes an appearance in her esoterically stylized worlds.
Influenced by Japanese manga and the whimsy of Ghibli films, as well as the idyllic natural worlds of classic-era Disney and the Golden Age of turn-of-the-century American Illustration, Sol incorporates references to varied cultural and folkloric embodiments of the feminine in ‘Dear Creatures’.
About Amy Sol:
Amy Sol spent her childhood years in Korea then moved to Las Vegas, Nevada where she currently lives and works. Though the style of her work is greatly influenced by a combination of manga, folk-art, vintage illustration and modern design, she remains a self taught artist. She has dedicated many years of her life mixing pigments and mediums to achieve a unique color palette of subtly muted tones.
The artist works intuitively from the beginning to end of each piece, with the intent that each painting’s theme or message can be interpreted subjectively. Within these delicate works, you may often find whimsical landscapes populated with exotic plants, animal and females… Amongst the expressions of each character are notions of peaceful reflection and a sense of companionship.
BRAD WOODFIN, Hold On (Gallery IV)
A self-described fan of devotional art, the experience that Brad Woodfin creates with his new series of oil paintings in ‘Hold On’ is nothing short of poetic. Referencing moments in his own personal life, the works echo a state of melancholy and uncertainty. As the title of the show suggests, Woodfin is asking us all to hold on… to the memories that make life so fragile and magical.
His portraits of creatures, rendered carefully on a rich dark background, evoke the portraits from the Dutch Golden Age. The posture of his subjects and his use of light combine to bestow each species with an almost religious reverence. With reverence for his subjects, Brad favours expression and mood over academic documentation.
About Brad Woodfin:
Brad Woodfin was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts in 1970. He studied printmaking and painting at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington before moving to Canada in 2008. Known for his uncanny ability to capture the essential spirit beyond his exquisitely executed fauna portraits, his oil paintings are thoughtful compositions of opposites: light and dark, tight and loose, motion and stillness, life and death.
Woodfin’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions across North America including: New York, Vancouver, Calgary, Seattle, and San Francisco as well as international group exhibitions and art fairs in London, Miami, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. In 2012, he was shortlisted for the prestigious Young Masters Art Prize (London, UK), which celebrates artists who pay homage to the skill and traditions of the past. He currently lives and works in Montréal.
