July: Angie Renfro and Scott Wright

Angie Renfro

Give a brief description of your upcoming show. And what might have inspired it.

This show is a collection of paintings from my “factories” series. This series arose from many long road trips across otherwise unremarkable landscapes. These giant hulking metal structures would just appear on the horizon and draw me to them. I was struck by the haunting, lonely quality of them – that they seem to be lying in wait of something.

How have you expanded existing themes/ideas for which you are best known/or if this body of work is a great deviation from your norm, what inspired this new approach?

The “factories” series is a continuation of my exploration of finding beauty in objects that aren’t traditionally considered beautiful and are often overlooked. I am drawn to things that have a sense of longing or disconnect about them. The paintings in this series have both qualities about them.

Stylistically and/or technically, what do you hope collectors notice in your new work?

What I love most about the factory paintings is the interplay between positive and negative space. I love the little shapes of sky that are made by the overlapping pipes and miscellaneous metal architecture. I enjoy the challenge of giving color and life to what would otherwise be monochromatic surfaces.

Add any additional info that might interest the viewer.

Of my current body of work, I find the factory paintings the most personally compelling. I find the oppositions contained within the work – positive/negative space; beauty/ruin; intricacy/simplicity – quite challenging and therefore of more interest to me to paint.

Scott Wright

Give a brief description of your upcoming show. And what might have inspired it.

In my artwork I explore our complex and often fractious relationship with the land by contrasting timeless natural cycles with the footprints made by our industry and patterns of habitation. If landscape can be defined as a segment of the world as humans envision it, then my artwork finds meaning in exploring the ever-changing psychic and physical interface between human technology and nature. I tend to work in series, and the works in this show include images from several ongoing series, including aerial landscapes; portraits of trees, waterways, and clouds; and the newest series that combines digital imagery with traditional landscape painting techniques. Weather imagery is an important theme in much of this work as it now serves as a direct gauge for witnessing our interference with natural planetary cycles.

How have you expanded existing themes/ideas for which you are best known/or if this body of work is a great deviation from your norm, what inspired this new approach?

In my most recent artwork I have been fascinated by a sense of nostalgia for the present day. There is fragility to the status quo. Sometimes when making my work I feel as though I am looking backwards in time from a very precarious future to the start of an unraveling calamity. As an artist I feel very strongly about spotlighting these issues.

Stylistically and/or technically, what do you hope collectors notice in your new work?

Throughout my career I have experimented with the tension between resolved images and gestural and textured surfaces. Combining computer data, a young medium, with painting, a very old medium, offers a nice sense of irony and surface tension. I’ve experimented recently with using grids as under-paintings, mixing computer glitch patchworks with sunlight on cirrus clouds, juxtaposing bended digital data with brushwork on canvas, and accompanying satellite weather radar references with antique photographic methods.

Add any additional info that might interest the viewer.

As an artist I’ve been inspired by everything from the Hudson River painters to abstract expressionists such as Joan Mitchell to imagery taken by the Hubble telescope. All of theses sources represent the natural world in ways that underscore its beauty and complexity and its ongoing transformation by human hands.