Below is the first announcement for my upcoming two-person exhibition in Santa Fe--more to come!

New, New Mexico Abstraction

Jamie Brunson and Nina Tichava

August 23-September 12, 2017 • Opening Reception August 25th, 5-7pm

Nina Tichava was born in Vallecitos, NM, and was raised between rural Northern New Mexico and the Bay Area, California. Jamie Brunson, on the other hand, was born in Coronado, CA, and built her career in the Bay Area, only recently moving to Northern New Mexico. However, both artists are interested in time and place, and the influence of these concepts in their work is subtle yet undeniable.

Brunson's work ranges from paper collage to large format fields of vibrating color rendered in oil and alkyd smooth as glass. Veils of finespun hue suggest the distant landscape, the point on the horizon where hills and plateaus are indistinguishable from variable cloud strata. Simultaneously academic and transcendental, her work explores the complex fluidity of language and culture as well as her immediate personal experiences. In this way, her body of work is both intellectually and spiritually stimulating, conceptually structured and procedurally improvised, both broad and expansive as well as local and extant.

Tichava works primarily from a procedural stance. Her art is about relationship, and her focus is on the interplay of elements and materials. Her process is best described as weaving, as she combines painting and printmaking techniques, drawing and collage, in a fashion both liberated and constrained. Tichava works to capture the immediacy and ephemeral nature of subjective experience. Deep emotion and personality are captured in the expressive layers as if caught up in a net, and the viewer is invited in a way to sift through the complexity of each composition to meet the artist on an empathetic level.