QuintGallery.com

QUINT: Three Decades of Contemporary Art

at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido Museum

August 15 – December 31, 2009

Special preview Saturday, August 15th from 6 – 9PM

340 N. Escondido Blvd.
Escondido, CA 92025
www.artcenter.org

Cocktails, hors d’ oeuvres, entertainment & live music.
$10 per person for non-members, free to Center Members.

RSVP to (760) 839-4120

The California Center for the Arts, Escondido Museum is pleased to present Quint: Three Decades of Contemporary Art. The exhibition, based on the program of one of San Diego County’s most influential galleries, will open on August 15th and continue through December 31st, 2009. Works in the exhibition, the majority of which have been borrowed from Southern California museums and private collections, present an extraordinary survey of the range of regional, national, and international artists supported and promoted by Quint Gallery over nearly thirty years.

Since opening his first gallery in La Jolla in 1981, Mark Quint adopted a unique, almost nomadic approach to the business of contemporary art. Rather than establishing itself in a permanent location and then expanding over time, Quint Gallery would more often adapt its spaces and program according to the needs of the artists it was interested in presenting. From formal gallery and raw open spaces in downtown San Diego, to large industrial workspaces for artists near Miramar Naval Air Base, to unexpected (and often elegant) spaces secluded in back alleys in Hillcrest or La Jolla, Quint Gallery has maintained the flexibility to represent artists employing a wide variety of practices, mediums, and formats.

It’s one of the centuries-old ideas about art that it can mirror the physical world, pleasurably, disturbingly or in other ways. And since its inception in the early 19th century, photography has long been a powerful medium in that respect. But photography, in the art arena, has strayed from this function regularly in the last three decades or so: Creating visual fictions is commonplace. Approaches are myriad and two distinctly different ones are in effect at Quint Contemporary Art in a pair of shows: “Making Space,” featuring Lee Materazzi’s pictures with performing models, and “Every Instance Removed,” Derek Stroup’s photographs that alter the designed landscape we take for granted.

Materazzi, an emerging photographer based in Miami and partly educated in London, makes loopy pictures with a symbolic undercurrent. You might say people are doing pretty dumb things in her pictures: making their heads disappear into the ground, a kitchen drawer or a picture on the wall. As much as we know that their heads haven’t truly evaporated into thin air, in most cases they look like they have. (No, she hasn’t Photoshopped them out of existence in the images; this is straightforward trickery.) So, aside from the smiles or chuckles Materazzi’s photographs may elicit, they play on the degree of willingness we have to delight in visual fantasy. Most are simply playful. And after seeing “Head in Grass” and “Head in Dirt,” you have to think there must be a “head-in-sand” print somewhere in her inventory. But a couple of other images convey a visual and emotional tension: “Head in Utensil Drawer,” with its sharp objects, and “Storage Container,” in which a person is crammed into a plastic canister in the bottom of a closet. There is an art historical pedigree to these pictures too, in dada, fluxus and conceptual art. But you don’t need to think about that to be amused by them. It’s hard to decide whether Materazzi is simply a clever artist or something more than that, based on this show. But I’m intrigued enough to want to see more of her work.

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to exhibit new works by artists Lee Materazzi and Derek Stroup. The exhibitions open on February 20th, 2008 with a public reception from 6-8 p.m. and continue through March 28th. The two solo exhibitions will occur simultaneously.
Miami based photographer, Lee Materazzi, graduated with honors from Central Saint Martins College in London. Ms. Materazzi has built a solid reputation as a talented and prolific photographer. Her work belongs in such prominent collections as The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, World Class Boxing, The Collection of Debra & Denis Scholl, and The Collection at the Sagamore. Materazzi stages elaborate theatrical scenes in which people seem to be fleeing their immediate surroundings or picking at the scab of estrangement by burying their heads in various surfaces. They appear vulnerable — victims of life’s banal intrusions, against which they fold without a fight.