NYT Little People: June 17, 2008, BOOMING, CHINA FAULTS U.S. POLICY ON THE ECONOMY  2008

Pat Boas, a Portland, OR-based writer and artist, has spent much of the last decade deconstructing the New York Times, isolating specific elements and highlighting juxtapositions of news and advertising. In her series NYT Little People Boas highlights the bit players – the everyman standing behind the president, who ends up on the front page. By decontextualizing these figures, floating them on a white ground, Boas attempts to find the meaning embedded in the form of the New York Times – one of the most recognizable and widely read newspapers in the United States.

Diagram of Isolated Moments Forming a Memory (Sarah M)  2008-09

Diagram of Isolated Moments Forming a Memory by Adam Chapman (San Francisco, CA) is a single channel programmed animation, framed and mounted as if it were a traditional drawing, in which colored lines and forms swim around, periodically forming representational portraits of the artist’s close friends and family. Every second of the installation is original. The piece is rule-generated and not a fixed composition, with a complete two-hour cycle forming fifty portraits. Chapman seeks to capture those fleeting, euphoric moments in which one catches a glimpse of clarity; a second of understanding one’s self, as well as one’s relationships

Stove  2008

Seattle, WA-based Isaac Layman, 2008 winner of the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Award, creates large-scale photographs of mundane household objects. Shooting with a high-resolution digital 4 x 5 camera, Layman knits together several images, perspectives, and depths of focus, ultimately presenting an impossibly clear image, in which the viewer can almost see all sides of these banal objects. However, this overdefinition of workaday objects can often confuse, as, in the end, one is incapable of comprehending all angles at once.

duck duck  2009

An accomplished painter, Joe Park (Seattle, WA) creates flat, smooth oil on panel works, which can range in style from quaint, paint-by-number style tableaux, to old-master style still lifes. Often appropriating or manipulating historical painting styles (futurism, cubism, etc.) or found imagery, Park uses his extraordinary skill to examine the relationship between process and content. Born in Ottawa, Canada, Park recently participated in the Apex series at the Portland Art Museum. His work is included in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum, WA and the Tacoma Art Museum, WA.

Stanford Art Library (NA7764-NA8206)  2009

Xiaoze Xie’s oil paintings bring together elements of traditional still-life painting and photography. This Bay Area-based, Chinese-born, artist presents paintings of piles of books or archives on library shelves. Based on Xie’s own photographs these works examine the symbolic nature of books – the implied access to knowledge and understanding, and the representation of belief systems and ideologies. Inaccessible and undefined in these works, these specific volumes simultaneously shut the viewer out, and entice the viewer in, offering their secrets. In 2009, Xie’s work was featured in China Urban at the Cooley Gallery at Reed College (Portland, OR).