Of Weight and Breath

Brett Baker, Susanna Coffey, Clare Grill, and Ellen Siebers

East Side Project Space, Nashville, Tenn.

April 7 to 28, 2018

Opening Reception: April 7, 6 to 9pm
Gallery Talk: April 14, 2pm

Of Weight and Breath  brings together paintings by Brett Baker (Raleigh, N.C.), Susanna Coffey (New York, N.Y.), Clare Grill (Queens, N.Y.), and Ellen Siebers (New York, N.Y.). This exhibition is co-curated by Christina Renfer Vogel and Ty Smith. It opens on April 7 and is on view through April 28. On April 14, the curators will hold a gallery talk for an opportunity to have an intimate conversation about the work on view, paintings that reward through close looking.

The work in this show is urgent and responsive. Each painter is keenly sensitive to their use of materials and their personal investigation of surface, every decision made through intention and discovery. These paintings present contradictions, contrasts of sensibilities and forms. Together, they are visual experiences of honesty and feeling, sharing tactility, weight, and reserve. The works encourage questions. They intimate softly but purposefully.

These paintings explore surface but also the complexity of seeing. At times, encountering this work is like looking from the corner of your eye. They hint at something tangible, but nothing is fully graspable. The paintings offer a pressing suggestion, something internal, about feeling and experience. They hover on the edge; they breathe, they shine.
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Brett Baker is a painter based in Raleigh, N.C. He is represented by Elizabeth Harris Gallery in New York where he had solo shows in 2013, 2015 and 2018. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting. In addition to being an artist, Baker is the editor of Painters' Table, an online painting magazine. He writes frequently about art; recent subjects include Pat Passlof, Chaim Soutine, George Braque, and Nicolas De Staël.
 
Susanna Coffey is the F.H. Sellers Professor in Painting at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received a BFA from from the University of Connecticut at Storrs and a MFA from The Yale School of Art. Coffey’s artwork has been exhibited in The Weatherspoon Art Museum, The Aldrich Museum, The Hood Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and others. Her work is included in the collections of The Yale University Art Gallery, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Minneapolis Museum of Art, and others. Among her awards are The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. Coffey lives and works in New York City. Her work is represented by Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects (New York, N.Y.), Alpha Gallery (Boston, Mass.), and Galeria Isabel Ignacio (Seville, Spain).
 
Originally from Chicago, Clare Grill  lives and works in Queens, N.Y. She received her MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2005 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. Solo exhibitions include Horton Gallery (New York, N.Y.), Reserve Ames (Los Angeles, Calif.), Soloway Gallery (Brooklyn, N.Y.), and Real Art Ways (Hartford, Conn.). Her work has been exhibited in group shows in Chicago, Seattle, St. Louis, New York, Hawaii, San Francisco, Guadalajara, London, Bologna, and Denmark. Grill was a 2017 recipient of a Steep Rock Arts residency in Roxbury, Conn. and was the Fall 2017 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Modern Painters, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe.
 
Ellen Siebers is a painter based in New York. Siebers was born and raised in Wisconsin. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa and her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Recent exhibitions include shows at Frosch & Portmann (New York, N.Y.), Sardine (Brooklyn, N.Y.), and Field Projects (New York, N.Y.).
 
Ty Smith lives and works in Birmingham, Ala. and serves as adjunct faculty for the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He received his BFA from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa in 2001 and his MFA from the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2009. Most recently, Smith had a solo exhibition of 49 drawings and works on paper at the University of Alabama Birmingham as well as a two person exhibition at Birmingham-Southern College. This past summer he was a part of the visiting faculty at the Mount Gretna School of Art in Lancaster, Pa.

Christina Renfer Vogel is based in Chattanooga, Tenn. She holds a MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and a BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Recent shows include solo exhibitions at Augsburg College (Minneapolis, Minn.) and the Julia Martin Gallery (Nashville, Tenn.). Vogel is a recipient of grants from The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and the Lighton International Artists Exchange Program, among other awards. She currently serves as an assistant professor of painting and drawing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
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East Side Project Space is in the Packing Plant at 507 Hagan St, Nashville, Tenn.

Opening Reception: Sat, April 7 from 6-9pm
Gallery Talk: Sat, April 14 at 2pm
Gallery Hours: Wed-Sat, 1-6pm, Sun, 1-4pm

Join us for the opening. 
 
For further information, please contact Christina Renfer Vogel by email atchristinarenfervogel@gmail.com. 
 
This exhibition is made possible with support from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Department of Art, the UTC College of Arts and Sciences, and Dustin Hedrick.

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Website link: 
http://www.tysmithart.com/news/2018/3/20/of-weight-and-breath

Press Release File: 
Ty Smith / Of Weight and Breath ESPS April 2018 / press release