Jan-Ru Wan, born in Taipei, Taiwan, first studied and worked as a fashion designer, but soon wanted to express something deeper with her work, something she calls "the power of thread." That concept, for her, encompasses symbolic and literal imageries of thread as a connector and mender of whatever has been torn. Brought up within the Taoist and Buddhist traditions, Wan’s work melds influences of both East and West, and often the words of the Heart Sutra, from Buddhist text, are found printed on the fabrics in her artwork. Her aesthetic embraces both positive and negative spaces, with ethereal volumes suspended on monofilament to create enveloping structures, seemingly arising from the void.
In Rome over the years, Thomas Lyon Mills has obtained permission to pass countless hours in places that are not always accessible to the public: Early Christian catacombs long under lock and key; a large ancient Mithraeum adjoining tunnels under the Baths of Caracalla; passageways beneath the Colosseum; the 5th-century church of Santa Maria Antiqua on the Roman Forum. In his native New York State, he retreats to a hidden spot in the Adirondacks, a natural sanctuary where, as in Rome, he absorbs the spiritual energies of the locale. For Mills, these sites invite contemplation, coalescing time, memory and other intangibles. He records in copious notes his impressions of these places and of the pre-16th-century art that deeply moves him, along with transcriptions each morning of his dreams. All find their way into his dense, middling- to large-scale mixed-medium drawings, which reveal their multilayered secrets slowly and incompletely to the beholder.
Blane De St. Croix works in sculpture, drawing and installation. His work articulates humankind’s desire to take command over the earth -- alluding to conflicts with ecology, politics and ourselves. The work also reveals conflicts with nature, while asking us to reflect on our precarious relationship with our surroundings. De St. Croix’s work draws from painting and sculpture’s historical use of the landscape as subject, entering it into the contemporary consciousness of the conflicted landscape; certainly paying homage to land artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer and the painter Anselm Kiefer.
The exhibit, titled AUTO MOTION, will include one of a kind Iris prints, multimedia video/animation DVDs, a three-dimensional Ferrari sculpture, as well as other prints based on the inspiration of the Ferrari automobile.
Laurence Gartel has been considered the "father" of the Digital Art medium for over 34-years. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Long Beach Museum of Art, Princeton Art Museum, Norton Museum of Art, Joan Whitney Payson Museum of Art, and in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History, Bibliothque Nationale, and most recently the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in London.
