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Eden's On Fire!
Saul Becker, Joy Garnett, and Michael
Schall
May 8 - June 14, 2008
Platform Gallery
platformgallery.com/
114 Third Avenue South
Seattle, WA 98104
206.323.2808
[email protected]
PRESS:
Carolyn Zick, "Seattle Is Burning," Dangerous Chunky Notebook, May 8, 2008
Regina Hackett, "Paint That Burns Through Narrative," Art To Go, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 19, 2008
Jen Graves, "Eden's on Fire," Slog, The Stranger, June 13, 2008
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In a period of time where arguments are
made about the existence of global warming, studies are mounted to
measure the impact on the environment and on society of urban sprawl,
and the effects of the rapid industrialization of developing countries
are felt, Platform Gallery is pleased to present Eden's On Fire!, a landscape group show featuring stunning paintings and masterful drawings made by artists Saul Becker, Joy Garnett, and Michael Schall.
Saul Becker's
drawings and paintings are made up of fragments and pieces from
different places and sources forming dreamy landscapes that are
powerful metaphors of utopias lost. Joy Garnett appropriates
newsworthy and documentary photographs from the Internet and re-invents
them as sumptuous paintings. Her subject is both the content of these
found images and the photograph itself as cultural artifact. Michael Schall
imagines landscapes where "instruments of human industry attempt to
somehow alter the surface of the earth." His large graphite drawings
celebrate both the futility and the potentiality of society's grand
constructions by exploring the way cities sprawl with both power plants
and landfills.
Biographies
Saul Becker
received a MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA). He
is represented by Sunday L.E.S. (New York) where he currently has a
solo exhibition. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Lab
Gallery, (New York, NY) Victory Hall Art Center (Jersey City, NJ) and
the Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA) among others. He was the recipient
of a Virginia Museum of Fine Art Fellowship as well as an Artist Trust
GAP Grant. His work has been discussed in NY Arts Magazine and the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Joy Garnett
studied painting at L'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in
Paris and received her MFA from The City College of New York. She
appropriates newsworthy and documentary photographs from the Internet
and re-invents them as paintings. Notable past exhibitions include her
recent solo show at Winkleman Gallery (New York, NY); Strange Weather
at the National Academy of Sciences, (Washington, DC); Image War,
organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York 2006); When
Artists Say We, Artists Space (New York 2006); Visionary Anatomies,
Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition (2004-2007); and Without Fear or
Reproach, De Witte Zaal (Ghent, Belgium 2003). Garnett's work has
appeared in Harper's, Cabinet magazine, and Perspecta: The Yale School of Architecture Journal.
She has received grants from the Anonymous Was a Woman foundation, and
the Wellcome Trust (UK), and currently serves as Arts Editor for the
scholarly journal Cultural Politics.
Michael Schall is
represented by Pierogi New York (New York, NY) where he had a solo in
2007. His work has been included in groups shows at Pierogi Leipzig
(Germany, 2007), Smack Mellon, (New York, 2007), Breda's Museum (The
Netherlands, 2007) Galerie Adler (Germany, 2006) and the 2005 CoCA
Annual (Seattle, WA 2005) among others. He received his MFA from Pratt
Institute in New York and is the recipient of a 2007-2008
Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
