FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

N A T U R A L  W O R L D
 

KIMBERLY VENARDOS & COMPANY is pleased to announce the opening of NATURAL WORLD, a group exhibition featuring work by JIM DINGILIAN, FREDERICK JESSER, GORDON MEIER, GRAHAM PARKS, DAVID SOLOW and WENDY WISCHER. Please join us at a reception for the artists Thursday, May 29^th, 2003 from 6pm to 8pm. The exhibition will remain on view through June 28, 2003.  KIMBERLY VENARDOS & COMPANY is located at 1014 Madison Avenue, between 78^th and 79^th Streets.

NATURAL WORLD brings together six contemporary artists whose work reflects upon and seeks to redefine our experience of nature.  Working in a variety of media, environment is explored through memory, time and architecture in vocabularies both representational and abstract.  Together these diverse and striking visions offer visceral contemplations on the NATURAL WORLD.   

JIM DINGILIAN’s delicate pencil drawings are rendered directly on the tops and back supports of grade-school desks. A forest, an open field, a parking lot, DINGILIAN’s dreamy vignettes exist in a fragile state, having not been ‘fixed’ to the wooden surfaces on which they are drawn.  The imagery and ephemeral aspect of his process have a cumulative effect, referencing the fleeting and elusive qualities of memory.  Untitled (fiction), FREDERICK JESSER’s large-scale installation places the viewer in the center of a sprawling autumnal forest; the sound of rustling leaves and the smell of woodland is almost palpable.  But a closer look finds that what we thought was, is not.  This environment has been digitally generated, altered, printed and made into wallpaper. Small orbs and futuristic creatures peer out from behind the leaves and trees. JESSER’s naturalistic mural is a visual pun, a pure fiction. Contemplating the changing face of the American countryside GORDON MEIER draws upon the conventions of traditional landscape painting to create poignant tableaus of suburban life and the effects of urbanization on the land. MEIER’s luminous panoramas, while often depicting the banal, a water tower or the distant neon lights of a small town, challenge the perception of beauty.  GRAHAM PARKS' small-scale paintings depict silhouette-like fragments of both natural and urban landscapes. Treetops and facades are transformed into poetic simplifications. Executed in a streamlined, graphically precise style, PARKS’ paintings explore the alliance between nature and architecture. Nature and humanity are the dominant themes in the photographic light boxes of DAVID SOLOW. Referencing architecture and cultivation, both outgrowths of civilization, SOLOW’s fluid images describe and resist in equal measure, engaging history and memory not as forces to be documented, but rather, to be experienced.  Continuing her conceptual explorations into the synthesis of nature and technology, WENDY WISCHER ’s Illumine photographs present the body as landscape.  Shadows of the artists’ arms and legs are interwoven with the limbs of a tree, their projected silhouettes captured off a glittering tarmac. Artificial, organic and sensual, WISCHER’s imagery depicts a terrain of light and shadow.

Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10am - 6pm. 
For additional information please contact the gallery or visit our website at
www.venardos.com