JAE KO : New Sculpture

JAE KO
Sculpture

Washington, D.C. based artist, Jae Ko uses rolled paper soaked in sumi ink to form spare, geometrically balanced, wall relief sculpture. Ko's work "occupies a space between writing and sculpture, between minimal abstraction and conceptual art."  Her unconventional medium has been described as resembling "yards of tightly wound velvet ribbon," suggesting ordered and organic nature.
Ko describes her process: "The edges of my three inch wide and infinitely long bands of paper, create line drawings which spiral, tighten and loosen depending on how they're rolled. Saturating the pre-set paper form in baths of Sumi ink such as saffron and indigo, the flat pieces of paper elongate and swell from the moisture."
While visually bridging in appearance materials such as velvet or charred wood, Jae Ko's work offers sculptural surfaces that compel inspection while suggesting the territory of deep space.

Biography
Jae Ko received her B.F.A. from Wako University, Tokyo, Japan and her M.F.A from the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore, MD. She has exhibited in Japan and throughout the United States since 1985, including the Uneo Museum, Tokyo, Japan, the Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, DC, the Kennedy Museum of Art, Athens, OH and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut. She has been awarded numerous fellowships including from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Virginia Museum of Fine Art.

BRAD MILLER
Burned Drawings

Colorado/ California artist Brad Miller continues to move beyond his previous work with his most recent "Burning Wood" series.  As a nationally known ceramic artist and wood sculptor, Miller's relationship to his mediums has shifted into exploring paper and wood surfaces by a process of cutting and singeing.

Artist Brad Miller uses several different butane and propane torches to ignite the space by cutting holes in the white paper surfaces and marking the golden color of the Baltic Birch plywood.  Much like a painter with a range of brush sizes, the artist unites a biomorphic quality in some instances with a Minimalist aesthetic, through repetition and bold form.  Miller's latest work offers the viewer an experience that is slightly disturbing, oddly familiar in its reference to nature and ultimately beautiful. Miller's past series of branch form sculpture, and ceramic vessels, both conceptual and utilitarian, inform this current direction of two-dimensional works.

Biography
Brad Miller received a M.F.A. at the University of Oregon. He has shown extensively throughout the United States since 1978, including the LongHouse Foundation, East Hampton, NY, the National Museum of Ceramic Art, Baltimore, MD, and the Denver Art Museum. His collections include the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. and Craft and Folk Art museum, Los Angeles, CA.  He was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1994.

TERRY MAKER
Sculptural Canvases

Colorado artist Terry Maker offers her latest in the "Manipulated Canvases Series"; part sculpture, part photography and always, part painting.
Maker amasses painted canvas rolls of varying sizes, mostly thin tubes and cuts them with a band saw into squares and rectangles. The cut ends reveal the pigment rolled up inside and which then becomes Maker's palette.  Heavily glued and sometimes combined with supplemental materials, the final results are a surprising view into painting, both reductive and conceptual.
This latest Maker showing is highlighted by the large-scale diptych; "Studio Scene #5".  Reconfiguring images of the artist in her studio by digital means and Maker's own distinctive technique; the linear, compacted bands of color address far-ranging, current dialogues in Art.  Terry Maker up- ends the traditional vocabulary in painting, such as Minimalism, and re-invents the usual perceptions of Portraiture and Fiber Art.

Biography
Terry Maker received a M. F. A. at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a Masters of Education at Texas Technical University in Lubbock, Texas. She has shown throughout the region and NY with notable recent exhibitions in 2002 such as Archipelago, An Intimate Immensity, at the Museum of Contemporary Art- Denver, and previously at Bard College in NY, as well as the Nicolaysen Museum in Casper, WY.  She has had numerous shows in Colorado, including the Boulder Museum of Art, the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Fort Collins and the Robischon Gallery.

ROSS BLECKNER

Internationally recognized artist Ross Bleckner, translates his painting vocabulary into prints in this most recent series of aquatint/etchings.  Emerging in the 1980's as a key figure in the New York East Village art scene, Bleckner's work referred more to the 1960's OP art movement than the expressionistic figuration trend of the day.  Ahead of his contemporaries, the artist's abstract canvases and prints of pulsing shimmering light, forecasted then and participate now in the current minimalist dialogue.
In this featured series of prints, Bleckner continues to explore his involvement with light as a phenomenon in the universe. The qualities in the color aquatint etchings, which often have been scraped and burnished, suggest the cosmos, constellations and the transient quality of light and time. 

Biography
Ross Bleckner received his M.F.A. at the California Institute of Art and his B.A. at the New York University. He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally including at the Galleriea d'Arte Contemporanea Modena, Italy, Museo Alejandro Otero Caracas, Venezuela, Bawag Foundation, Vienna, Austria, the national Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

In the Viewing Room:

JUDY PFAFF
Drawings

In conjunction with the release of her comprehensive monograph, famed American installation artist Judy Pfaff explores her spontaneous approach through recent print and mixed-media works on paper. Based in New York, Pfaff was one of the principal pioneers of installation art in the 1970s, breaking away from the largely metaphorical and narrative works of artists such as Edward Keinholz and Joseph Beuys into an abstract and non-narrative expression.  In this body of work, Pfaff expands on her eclectic vocabulary taken from the natural world, architecture and from disparate materials such as resin, floated ink, lace and leaves.