Michael Kalmbach

Night Fever Diptych

Michael Kalmbach

2008

Acrylic on Plastic Wrapped Over Felt and Poster Cut-outs

Two 36" x 18" panels

The Rockies

Michael Kalmbach

2008

Acrylic on Plastic Wrapped Over Felt

20" x 20"

Sensual Seduction + detail shot

Michael Kalmbach

2008

Acrylic on Plastic Wrapped Over Tie-dyed Faux Fur

50" x 50"









Built from the debased materials of plastic and craft felt, I see my paintings as quixotic meditations on the transformative power of material. I utilize repetition, variation, ritual performance, and improvisation as working devices that generate product and ideas.



The work Night Fever Diptych attempts to recontextualize Saturday Night Fever as a lesson in class division in the arts. How de-intellectualizing the body leads to false hierarchies and theories of exclusion. Born from a Coors Light commercial, The Rockies locates the contemporary sublime in plastic, it is simultaneously surface and abyss. Its purples pulled from the uniform of the thin-air-home-run hitting Colorado Rockies.

Sensual Seduction gets its title from a recent Snoop Dogg track-- in this work the dot strands direct the poured acrylic. The trails that are created begin to form a type of drawing, with this knowledge in my back pocket, I press on in the production of awesome.

Glimmer

Glimmer

Francine Fox

2008

Ink & watercolor on paper

11.5" x 14"

I am interested in the connection between controlling one’s physical appearance and perception of identity. My work specifically examines the relationship between philosophies that place emphasis on individualism, and those that emphasize society as a whole in which the individual plays a small part. Within my imagery I strive to convey states of unrest in which the depicted figures struggle to obtain an ever elusive clarity of identity. Through intricate rendering of the conjoined figures, their garments, and tattoos, I hope to mirror both the complexity of societies in which one establishes personal identity, and the complexity of identity itself.

Eiffel Tower, Brandt's Cormorant, Mt. McKinley

Eiffel Tower, Brandt's Cormorant, Mt. McKinley
Anthony Vega
2008
Acrylic on Canvas
50" by 50"


My primary interest in this work is visual experience. The intention is that painting can offer a unique insight into the experience of our visual culture and current relationship between objects, their meanings and our ability to see. This work explores these relationships through media connections of objects and the seemingly disparate, and unclear qualities these connections create. Our visual experience is cluttered and flattened by these connections. Where one object or meaning begins is unclear, our relationship to visual experience has an impact that at once loses the object and creates a new one. The simulation of images camouflages visual understanding.