PROSCENIUM
Featuring works by Emily Weiner & Thomas Wharton
Curated by Ashley Layendecker
June 16 - September 6
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 16th, 6pm-8pm
pro·sce·ni·um: the part of a theatre stage in front of the curtain
Peering through red velvet curtains, Emily Weiner’s paintings are stages for the imagination, transformation, narrative and drama. Thomas Wharton’s images of luminaires convey a time of day, mood, and transition. These artists use the architecture of the theatre to transport an audience from the flatness of the picture plane into the depths of light and space. This exhibition explores how paintings can walk the line between physical structures and optical illusions. Both artists use the proscenium as a literal framework, a symbolic structure, and a device to extend the two-dimensional picture plane into a three-dimensional space.
Emily Weiner frames each of her paintings in wood, clay, and plaster. She uses sharp and soft edges to convey space within the picture plane. A moon, the singular light source central to many of the images, beams a ray of light that is both calm and suspenseful. This work directly represents theatre, performance, and stories of times past and present.
Thomas Wharton’s formal arrangements explore composition through repeated and rearranged light switches and light bulbs. He manipulates the image by flipping, turning, reflecting, and representing images of the same objects. Drop shadows creates an optical illusion that extends the painting into a perceived physical space. Using photography and realist painting skills, Thomas suspends the viewer in contemplation on what is actual and what is manipulated.
“What is known is distorted with what is shown” – Thomas Wharton
ARTIST STATEMENTS
“In my paintings, I have been combining symbols from the past and present, to connect visual threads that run from ancient craft traditions to the archetypes perennially observed in art, mythologies, and dreams. My recent works look to theater—ranging from Greek drama and Commedia dell’arte to Yiddish comedy and film—as a parallel to painting, and a way to tell a story unmoored from a single origin. These works—oil on linen, set in ceramic or painted-wood frames—rely on intuition, image research, synchronicity, time, and layers of paint. They question how meaning is shaped, shared, and translated across generations and disparate locations.”
– Emily Weiner
“Both readymade and invented light switches function as focal points in my work. I have replaced many control knobs with hand turned wooden “spindle-dimmers” of my own design. Spindles are press fit into pedestals or other wall receptacles to control a variety of lighting solutions including table lamps, sconces, and track lights among others. These objects are designed with concepts of light in mind: they are lightly grounded, just touching or grazing a base; they have surfaces that specifically reflect or diffuse; they are symmetrical. My impetus to design and create these devices has been threefold: – To make an object that is transformed when the viewer becomes a user. – To make an object that controls light – To make images of and with this object As the “spindle” is repeated and reinterpreted in different media it becomes a landmark directing a viewer through artworks, spatial awareness, touch, and function. The resulting photos, drawings, and paintings use a pared down vocabulary of rectangles and circles. Drawn and painted canvases encapsulating digital prints re-represent the light and shadows captured in photographs. Traditional oil paintings depict the same materials at different angles to provide asymmetrical snapshots of symmetrical compositions. The space around a picture, the lighting in an exhibition space, and the positions of the viewer, are devices I use to make a viewer aware of their own observation. Though my pictures are representations of something tangible, and even useful, pictorial arrangements can make the work appear abstract; what is known is distorted with what is shown.”
– Thomas Wharton
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
EMILY WEINER is a painter living and working in Nashville, TN. Combining ceramics and oil painting, her works configure icons, geometries, and material motifs which reappear throughout the history of artmaking. She is interested in the ways in which symbols move between the collective unconscious and individual perception. Weiner received her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University (2003) and her MFA in Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts (2011). Past exhibitions of her paintings include: Whitespace Gallery (Atlanta, GA); Brackett Creek Exhibitions (New York, NY); David Lusk Gallery (Nashville, TN); Gerdarsafn Museum (Kopavogur, Iceland); LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University (New York); CULT (San Francisco); Soloway (Brooklyn), and Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia). She has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome (2015); residency co-leader at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Newcastle, Maine (2018); Artist Teacher-Resident at The Cooper Union, New York, NY (2014); artist-in-residence at The Banff Centre, Canada (2012); and resident at Camac Art Center in France (2011). She is represented by Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville, TN.
THOMAS WHARTON (b. 1987, Plainview, New York) received his BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2011 and his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Tennessee Knoxville in 2015. He has been the subject of several solo exhibitions in galleries throughout the South and Midwest. His work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including the University of Tennessee Knoxville; Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA; and the Savannah College of Art and Design. Wharton has been exhibited nationally in group exhibitions at First Street Gallery in New York; GCADD in Granite City, Illinois; and Satellite Contemporary in Las Vegas, NV among others. He has been published in New American Paintings, Burnaway Magazine, and Numbers Inc. Thomas received numerous awards including a full fellowship as an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center as well as the Sylvia Smith ’73 Artist in Residence program at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. The artist currently lives in Omaha, Nebraska where he works as a visual artist and adjunct professor at Midland University and Metropolitan Community College