what's MY line

ALICIA McCARTHY • MARIA VASCONCELOS • JULIA COUZENS • MILES NEIDINGER • ADAM FOWLER

MAY 11 – JUNE 17, 2018
OPENING RECEPTION FRIDAY, MAY 11, 6–9 PM

Line is the cornerstone of the visual arts. With a distinctiveness that signifies its basic strength of purpose, it defines space, builds form, describes movement, and conjures optical effect. For the artists in what’s MY line, the creation of a line performs not only these foundational tasks, but also binds them to its form, allowing individually ascribed meanings to flourish.

Alicia McCarthy uses motifs such as abstracted weaves of line to capture moments. They often include indications of physical presence left on the found surfaces on which she makes her work, emphasizing the personal aspect of seemingly abstract elements. Maria Vasconcelos uses paint in a completely different manner, highlighting its physicality to create wall sculptures of repetitive and jumbled lines of text in order to map language as rhythm and energy.
 
Julia Couzens knits, stitches and mends her lines into wall sculptures holding her works together physically while never quite congealing optically. Her lines are thread-y linear entanglements that she likens to “gestures looking for enchantment in a provisional world.” Conversely, Miles Neidinger’s work doesn’t need his line to hold anything together, as it is continuous. He bends and compresses electrical conduit into sculptural form. An electrician by trade, he uses his vocational skills to realize his creations. The line he invokes represents parts of multiple intersecting networks that exist all around us whether this is biological, neural, electrical, or data.

Finally, Adam Fowler’s work consists of layers of graphite line drawings from which he physically removes the negative space between strokes before carefully stacking them together. Positivity and negativity play off one another, as do two and three dimensionality. Adam’s gestural lines harken to the pared down honesty of primitive human communication before language… of simply watching each other’s movements in order to facilitate understanding.

The artists in what’s MY line each have a personal relationship with the line they use. Whether building it with paint, stitching it with thread, bending it in pipe, or cutting it from paper, they treat the line as a stand-in for themselves and their relationships to the greater world. By extension, these personal insights reflect and connect to others who view them, expanding our own understanding of what it is to be human.

Julia Couzens is a California based artist and writer who’s work has been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum; Hammer Museum; Weatherspoon Art Museum; Christopher Grimes Gallery,Santa Monica; Lesley Heller Workspace and P.P.O.W., New York.

Adam Fowler received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Fowler is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a Fellowship in Drawing from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant. His works have been exhibited in many public institutions such as the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, the Drawing Center, New York, NY, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC. His work has been published in the Harvard Review and reviewed by The New York Times, Art News, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice and many others.

Alicia McCarthy received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from the University of California at Berkeley. She has exhibited across America and internationally, and last year received the SECA Award from SFMoMa. McCarthy has received residencies from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, the Headland Arts Center and New Langton Art, San Francisco. She has been reviewed by Artforum, the New York Times, and the Vulture Review. Public collections with works by the artist include: MIMA the Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art in Brussels, American Academy of Arts & Letters in New York City, Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, CA and Oakland Museum of California.

Miles Neidinger graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute with a BFA in sculpture. Artist residencies include Studios INC and Vermont Studio Center. He has had his work shown at such locations as the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, KS, the Finch Gallery in Chicago, IL, and the Rare Gallery in New York City. Additionally, he received an Arts KC Grant, was a Rocket Grant recipient, Art Through Architecture participant and a Charlotte Street Foundation Award recipient. His work has been published in Art in America, The Kansas City Star, Review Magazine, and Pitch Weekly.

Born in Lisbon, Portugal, Maria Vasconcelos is an artist living and working in New York City, she received her BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston/Tufts and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. While at the San Francisco Art Institute, she was awarded the Graduate Merit Fellowship Award and was the recipient of The Headlands Center for the Arts MFA Residency Award, more recently her work was included in “Text & Image” at the Site:Brooklyn Gallery and in the c2c group show “wording” in San Francisco.