Grackle Flock, Stone Mountain, California, 2008, oil, magazine collage, Prisma color on canvas, 35 x 53 inches That looks beautiful....Here some of the background story and information about the opening.
Joan Wich & Co. Gallery is pleased to introduce the work of Cheyanne Ramos in the exhibition, Lost Paradise, opening Friday, July 10, 2009 and presented in conjunction with ArtHouston.
Ramos, who recently earned her MFA from the University of Houston, presents here a body of paintings and collages that are, frankly, eerie. Often using actual events of a disastrous nature (Hurricane Ike's devastation of Galveston, for example) together with her own bizarre imaginings, Ramos draws from her extensive treasury of found photographs and clip-art to create worlds fallen or - even worse - worlds about to fall apart. Dramatic but certain doom looms as actual characters in these disaster works - a tornado, a hurricane, a volcano - while Ramos plays with time: whether the disaster has already struck, or is about to. In Future Prospects, old Galveston after-Ike has been refigured entirely into a city recognizable only by vaguely familiar buy disparate parts of the original buildings, yet all still lit by a disquieting orange light. In Sea of Sorbitol, two children play unsupervised on a dirty beach unaware of just how dirty that beach will be when the fuming volcano on the next atoll cranks up. In any and all cases, the world Ramos imagines has changed, or is about to, and there's not much we can do about it, pre- or post-disaster. Nature wins; we cope as we can, or don't, leaving what remains to the birds in Grackle Flock.
Of her own work, Ramos says, "They are amalgamations of real, perceived, and projected experiences built from the fragments of found and personal photographs, objects, memories, art history, and the natural environment. I fuse these unstable, divergent and often times conflicted sources into new fictions. Places appear as apparitions, distorted or idealized memories, fabrications, or projections. Together they conflate time - the present exists as the discomfort between a nostalgic past and a foreboding future." The results are inventive, haunting, and beautifully fascinating paintings.
A preview reception for the artist will be held Friday evening, July 10th from 6 - 8 pm. The gallery will be open on Saturday, July 11 from 11 am to 5 pm to celebrate ArtHouston, which with other participating galleries, will solicit contributions to benefit the reconstruction of Galveston Art Center.
Regular gallery hours are Tuesday thru Saturday 11 - 5.
Those steeped streets are insane! This woman was strolling her baby cart naturally down the street and all I could see was a tragedy to happen, fortunately no baby went down the hill this time.
Beautiful retrospective exhibition. I saw one of my favorite photo ever!
