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Sarkisian & Sarkisian: Side By Side Exhibitions of Two Contemporary Artists
http://asbarez.com/121459/sarkisian-sarkisian-side-by-side-exhibitions-of-two-contemporary-artists/
Thursday, April 3rd, 2014
'Dusted' by Peter Sarkisian
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.--The Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) is
presenting the long-overdue California survey of video artist Peter
Sarkisian (born 1965, Glendale, Calif.) in the exhibition "Sarkisian &
Sarkisian," which also includes a survey of the artist's father, Paul
Sarkisian (born 1928, Chicago, Ill.), a member of the avant-garde
movement in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s.
For the exhibition, OCMA Interim Director and Chief Curator Dan
Cameron selected 23 video sculptures by Peter Sarkisian along with 22
paintings by Paul Sarkisian to develop a thematic bridge between the
separate bodies of work; tying together two accomplished careers that
achieved distinctively different practices. The exhibition is on view
April 13 through July 27, 2014.
Although it employs a single title, "Sarkisian & Sarkisian" is
experienced as side-by-side survey exhibitions of two contemporary
artists who happen to be father and son, working in different media.
Paul has been an accomplished and dedicated painter for six decades,
while Peter studied film directing at Cal Arts and has produced video
installations since the mid-1990s. Within an exhibition layout in
which an equivalent amount of visual attention is dedicated to each
artist's work, a connection between the two bodies of work emerges in
the shared artistic device of trompe l'oeil, whose translation as
"fool the eye" is an apt summation of how both artists use pictorial
illusion to achieve very different ends.
"Sarkisian & Sarkisian" began as a straightforward overview of nearly
twenty years of work by Peter Sarkisian, whose spatial integration of
film, video and sculpture results in precisely calibrated multi-media
works that consistently challenge the viewers' perception of reality
and illusion. From the groundbreaking work Dusted (1998), which
utilized projection on the five faces of a cube to create the illusion
of a mother and infant son inside; to the comical/violent antics of
Registered Drive, Full Scale #1, (2010), in which a full-size model of
a Ferrari Modena body serves as the frame for a driving lesson from
hell, Sarkisian's work employs video to punch through the spatial
limits of pictorial space.
One of the leading members of the generation of video-based sculptors
that emerged in the 1990s, Sarkisian's work, while not as widely known
as that of older video artists like Gary Hill or Bill Viola, is widely
regarded among curators and writers within this still relatively
specialized field. As Sarkisian's work follows its evolutionary arc to
his more recent robotic and levitation pieces, the technical
challenges he is forced to overcome become increasingly difficult for
ordinary viewers to grasp, and more hypnotically engaging.
Paul Sarkisian began his career in the mid-1950s as one of the
founding members of a cooperative gallery in Pasadena whose members
also included George Herms and Richard Pettibone. Although his work in
the 1950s was heavily indebted to abstract expressionism, by the early
1960s he was making assemblage-based paintings that led to large-scale
figurative paintings of an almost photographic precision. Early
exhibitions at Pasadena Art Museum (1968) and Santa Barbara Museum of
Art (1970) cemented his growing reputation as one of the most
promising of an emerging generation of painters, as did his
participation in documenta5 in Kassel, Germany, curated by Harald
Szeeman. In 1972, as a sign of his growing disillusionment with the
increasingly commercialized art market and the pigeon holing of his
work as 'photo-realism; Sarksian moved with his wife and son to the
outskirts of Santa Fe, where the next decades of his artistic
development remained all but hidden from the art establishment.
As Sarkisian's painting developed from realism to trompe l'oeil to
what became even more erroneously labeled as 'abstract illusionism,'
his exploration of illusion was gradually supplanted by an a growing
emphasis on exploring the qualities of surface in abstract painting,
and his work increasingly emphasized large, open expanses of saturated
color and dense, opaque polymer resins. With less than twenty examples
of his work covering the years from 1971 to 2009, it is only possible
to touch on the high points of this development, but the monotypes
that occupied his attention in the 1990s, his giant monochromes of the
early 2000s, and his recent collaged abstractions are all sufficiently
represented to give viewers a taste for his unique artistic
trajectory.
"Sarkisian & Sarkisian" is curated by Interim Director and Chief
Curator Dan Cameron. Significant support for the exhibition is
provided by Dick and Dottie Barrett and the Levy Foundation
From: Baghdasarian
http://asbarez.com/121459/sarkisian-sarkisian-side-by-side-exhibitions-of-two-contemporary-artists/
Thursday, April 3rd, 2014
'Dusted' by Peter Sarkisian
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.--The Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) is
presenting the long-overdue California survey of video artist Peter
Sarkisian (born 1965, Glendale, Calif.) in the exhibition "Sarkisian &
Sarkisian," which also includes a survey of the artist's father, Paul
Sarkisian (born 1928, Chicago, Ill.), a member of the avant-garde
movement in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s.
For the exhibition, OCMA Interim Director and Chief Curator Dan
Cameron selected 23 video sculptures by Peter Sarkisian along with 22
paintings by Paul Sarkisian to develop a thematic bridge between the
separate bodies of work; tying together two accomplished careers that
achieved distinctively different practices. The exhibition is on view
April 13 through July 27, 2014.
Although it employs a single title, "Sarkisian & Sarkisian" is
experienced as side-by-side survey exhibitions of two contemporary
artists who happen to be father and son, working in different media.
Paul has been an accomplished and dedicated painter for six decades,
while Peter studied film directing at Cal Arts and has produced video
installations since the mid-1990s. Within an exhibition layout in
which an equivalent amount of visual attention is dedicated to each
artist's work, a connection between the two bodies of work emerges in
the shared artistic device of trompe l'oeil, whose translation as
"fool the eye" is an apt summation of how both artists use pictorial
illusion to achieve very different ends.
"Sarkisian & Sarkisian" began as a straightforward overview of nearly
twenty years of work by Peter Sarkisian, whose spatial integration of
film, video and sculpture results in precisely calibrated multi-media
works that consistently challenge the viewers' perception of reality
and illusion. From the groundbreaking work Dusted (1998), which
utilized projection on the five faces of a cube to create the illusion
of a mother and infant son inside; to the comical/violent antics of
Registered Drive, Full Scale #1, (2010), in which a full-size model of
a Ferrari Modena body serves as the frame for a driving lesson from
hell, Sarkisian's work employs video to punch through the spatial
limits of pictorial space.
One of the leading members of the generation of video-based sculptors
that emerged in the 1990s, Sarkisian's work, while not as widely known
as that of older video artists like Gary Hill or Bill Viola, is widely
regarded among curators and writers within this still relatively
specialized field. As Sarkisian's work follows its evolutionary arc to
his more recent robotic and levitation pieces, the technical
challenges he is forced to overcome become increasingly difficult for
ordinary viewers to grasp, and more hypnotically engaging.
Paul Sarkisian began his career in the mid-1950s as one of the
founding members of a cooperative gallery in Pasadena whose members
also included George Herms and Richard Pettibone. Although his work in
the 1950s was heavily indebted to abstract expressionism, by the early
1960s he was making assemblage-based paintings that led to large-scale
figurative paintings of an almost photographic precision. Early
exhibitions at Pasadena Art Museum (1968) and Santa Barbara Museum of
Art (1970) cemented his growing reputation as one of the most
promising of an emerging generation of painters, as did his
participation in documenta5 in Kassel, Germany, curated by Harald
Szeeman. In 1972, as a sign of his growing disillusionment with the
increasingly commercialized art market and the pigeon holing of his
work as 'photo-realism; Sarksian moved with his wife and son to the
outskirts of Santa Fe, where the next decades of his artistic
development remained all but hidden from the art establishment.
As Sarkisian's painting developed from realism to trompe l'oeil to
what became even more erroneously labeled as 'abstract illusionism,'
his exploration of illusion was gradually supplanted by an a growing
emphasis on exploring the qualities of surface in abstract painting,
and his work increasingly emphasized large, open expanses of saturated
color and dense, opaque polymer resins. With less than twenty examples
of his work covering the years from 1971 to 2009, it is only possible
to touch on the high points of this development, but the monotypes
that occupied his attention in the 1990s, his giant monochromes of the
early 2000s, and his recent collaged abstractions are all sufficiently
represented to give viewers a taste for his unique artistic
trajectory.
"Sarkisian & Sarkisian" is curated by Interim Director and Chief
Curator Dan Cameron. Significant support for the exhibition is
provided by Dick and Dottie Barrett and the Levy Foundation
From: Baghdasarian