PARALLELS

DON VOISINE

“The simple vernacular of architecture informs my paintings. Architecture – a language of space – delineates boundaries, exposes points of access, exit or entry, and enables the user to interact with the structure of a defined space. Working with symmetry and a standardized format to reduce variables, I establish borders on all planes. Color activates an apparent void; a reflective surface opens a window into the painting, both mirroring and obscuring the view. Such devices restrict and ultimately reveal the interior spaces, establishing a fluid subjectivity between the viewer and the work. I’m working to make something that is relevant now, a different way of thinking about abstraction. One of those things is space. Like, Greenberg’s formalism is about flatness. I’ve always been trying to bring a kind of visual space into my work. Not something illusionistic, but a real visual space.”  - Don Voisine

Don Voisine graduated from Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, in Deer Isle, ME, and the Rochester Institute of Technology, NY. He also has an Honorary Ph.D. of Humane Letters from the University of Maine at Fort Kent, ME. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, the Artist Fellow in Painting finalist for the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Surf Point Foundation Residency, York, ME, the Purchase Prize, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, a Purchase Prize, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, and the Bau Institute Fellowship, Aragonese Castle, Otranto, Italy. His work is in public collections internationally, including the About Change, Collection, Rottach-Egern at Tegernsee, Germany, the Art in Embassies Program, United States Department of State, Washington, DC; the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst, Soest, Germany, the National Academy Museum, New York, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Missoula Art Museum, Missoula, MT; the New York Public Library, NY; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Neuberger Berman, New York, NY; the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; the United States Embassy, Annex, Beijing, China; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; and the Joel and Lila Harnett Print Study Center, University of Richmond Museum, Richmond, VA, among others. 

MARCELYN MCNEIL

“My work is always idiosyncratic. Some paradoxical qualities found in my paintings are biomorphic and geometric, quiet and loud, controlled and improvised, lyrical and muscular, and thick and thin. The work is about push and pull. I have this thing about bringing disparate elements together. It reveals the tension between opposing things. My surfaces have thin veils of paint to get to these soft and evocative places and then I am combining that with very hard-edge, graphic flat areas of paint. Those two things, while they are very different vocabularies, seem to charge one another; feed off of each other. The pigment is being absorbed into the skin of the canvas. It’s almost like the paint is absorbed in a quiet, yet substantive, meditative way. To me, that’s sort of political, so I feel like I have a responsibility to be the best in my practice, that I can be and be sensitive to the moment in creating something that is really the antithesis of the moment. It’s not about trying to silence things, it’s to acknowledge the moment that we are in.” - Marcelyn McNeil

Marcelyn McNeil received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR. Her work has been shown throughout the US with Museum exhibitions at the Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, and the San Antonio Museum of Art, TX, and was included in exhibitions at the Galveston Art Center, Galveston, TX, the Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX, and the Oak Cliff Cultural Center, Dallas among others. McNeil is a recipient of the Zeta Orionis Fellowship by the Vermont Studio Center, the 100 W Corsicana Residency, Corsicana, TX, the CAAP Grant, by the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Chicago as well as the Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship at MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH. Additionally, McNeil has been a Sharps-Walentas Studio Program Fellow, Visual Artist of the Year at the Decorative Arts Center, Houston, TX, and a repeated finalist of the Hunting Art Prize, and received the Purchase Award from the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR. Her work was featured in several issues of the acclaimed periodical “New American Paintings” (Western Edition) and the monograph “Marcelyn McNeil - Works,” was published by Radius Books, Santa Fe, NM with essays by Hesse McGraw, Executive Director at CAM Houston TX, and Alison Hearst, curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX. 

DEBORAH ZLOTSKY

“As a painter, abstraction is a language to tell a story obliquely and metaphorically, to offer a narrative hiding in plain sight. I’m interested in how individual histories become embodied experiences as a consequence of family dynamics, cultural ancestries, and gender. To explore these ideas, I create animated abstract interrelationships to suggest situations and internalized states that are not easily categorized. In my paintings, I imagine situations that are both old and new where I can create beauty and humor to live with my recognition of the intractable layering of history. Art history informs my language of abstraction and illusion: the mix of flatness and perspective in early Renaissance frescoes; the transmutations of Surrealism; and the colorful animation of psychedelia and Pop. Graphic elements from material culture also shape how I construct an abstract vocabulary. For example, within traditions of Western image-making, stripes can indicate a rejected or problematic status, serving as code for outcasts from society. Incongruities—between geometry and the naturalism of trompe l’oeil, and between fictional gravity and factual flatness—refer to the complexity of internalized sensations and generational repercussions.” - Deborah Zlotsky

A 2019 recipient of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts, Deborah Zlotsky received her MFA from the University of Connecticut, and her BA from Yale University. A two-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Artists’ Fellowship in Painting; the Two Coats of Paint Residency Fellowship, Brooklyn, NY, the Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship; First Place Award, SACI International Art Competition, Studio Art Center International (SACI), Florence, Italy; Juror’s Award, Mohawk Hudson Regional; and The Albany Institute of History and Art, Albany, NY juried by Stephen Westfall, are among many prestigious recognitions that Zlotsky has received throughout her career. Zlotsky’s work has been exhibited in a multitude of solo and group exhibitions including the Woodstock Art Museum; the Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, NY; the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; Studio Art Center International Gallery, Florence, Italy; and Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Warne, IN, among others. Her work is housed in the permanent public collections of Rutgers University, NJ; Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, Istanbul; Waldorf Astoria, NY; New York Palace Hotel, NY; William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, CT; Albany Institute of History and Art; RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design; Polsinelli Collection; University of Iowa Health Center; Indiana University of Pennsylvania; Loomis Chaffee School, Windsor, CT; University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA; Sioux City Art Center, Sioux City, IA; Nebraska-Wesleyan University, Lincoln, NE; Southwest Texas State University, and Eastern Oregon State University. 

LINDA FLEMING

“My most recent works project the sense of having never had another history but their own. They allow multiple focus points to create a shifting concentration of form and color that unfolds through the viewer’s changing position. You can see the object, the interior of the object, and through the object simultaneously while multiple colors mix in your eye to become a color that isn’t physically there. My works are my best attempt to use the physical arena to try out my perceptual observations. Always waiting to be let in on the secret of existence, I realized that I had to find it myself bit by bit over a lifetime. Making has allowed me to follow these questions to ever more elaborate questions and out onto limbs that force me back to the main trunk of the tree, pulled by the hope of seeing deeper into the nature of being. In my mind, these varied works depend on each other to complete the complexity of my investigation. Nothing exists except in relation to something else as stated in quantum physics. All of these works equally explore physicality and existence. All are ways of being. Each thing is an invitation to the next idea and the trail of forms define an accumulated vision without beginning or end that is brought into being by listening to those quiet, simple first questions… what… why… how. We are not just who we become, but everything we ever were.” - Linda Fleming

Linda Fleming attended the San Francisco Art Institute and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She was a professor at California College of the Arts from 1986 to 2017 and held the position of Sculpture Department Chair from 1988 to 2000. She has received numerous prestigious recognitions including those from the International Sculpture Center, Peter S. Reed, Adolph & Ester Gottlieb, and Pollock-Krasner foundation. Her work is in the permanent collections of Santa Clara University, the Berkeley Art Museum, Laumeier Sculpture Park, Oakland Museum of California, University of Wyoming, Stanford University Museum, and Albuquerque Museum along with additional collections both public and private. Noteworthy exhibitions include Fleming’s recent KANEKO retrospective “Experimenta de Vacuo Spatio,” “Confluence,” exhibited at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and “Making Places,” at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, as well as her touring exhibition featuring the artist’s extensive and intricate maquette series entitled, “Linda Fleming: Modeling the Universe” originating at the Nevada Art Museum and “Drawn To/Drawn From: A 45 Year Survey'' at Oats Park Art Center, Fallon, Nevada; “Glimmer,” a site-specific sculpture for the Oakland Museum of Art, exhibited in the OMCA’s iconic sculpture gardens; and Robischon Gallery’s 2016 exhibition “DECLARATION,” in which Fleming’s work was exhibited alongside other historically important and esteemed artists: Louise Bourgeois, Ruth Bernhard, Helen Frankenthaler, Ann Hamilton, Jae Ko, Yayoi Kusama, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Shirin Neshat, Judy Pfaff, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, and Kara Walker.

KATE PETLEY

“I construct abstract paintings by first creating temporary and dramatically lit sculptural arrangements that are photographed and printed. Further alterations to the surface may include hand painted areas that are not readily apparent. The resulting images have a cinematic appearance that expresses the transformation of materials through light and color. Physical sensation is prioritized. - Kate Petley

Kate Petley received a BFA cum laude from the University of Utah. Her work has been featured in more than thirty solo exhibitions and in publications such as Artforum, Lenscratch, L’Oeil de la Photographie, and the Houston Chronicle. Recent catalogue essays include Digital Visions by Saul Ostrow for the Grinnell College Museum of Art. Petley had major solo exhibitions at the University of Colorado Art Museum, Denver, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, as well as exhibitions at the Museum of South Texas, Nicolaysen Art Museum, Martin Museum of Art at Baylor University, Museum of the Southwest, and the Arlington Museum of Art. Petley participated in PhotoIreland 2017 in Dublin and is a recipient of several grants and awards, including the Ucross Foundation fellowship, the NEA Rockefeller Foundation grant, the Individual Artist Support Grant, Colorado Creative Industries, State of Colorado. Her work is in private, corporate, and public collections including the Grinnell College Museum of Art; Stanford University, Palo Alto CA; the University of Colorado Art Museum (CUAM), Boulder, CO; the City of Houston; the Polsinelli Collection; New York Presbyterian Hospital; the Federal Reserve Bank; the Howard Hughes Company and others.