Robert Berman Gallery

Review of Just Occupy in ART LTD March/April 2012. The iconic...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:06:17 -0700

Review of Just Occupy in ART LTD March/April 2012. The iconic triptych from this show that premiered at Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station includes work by both Shepard Fairey and Ted Soqui is currently on view by appointment only at E6 Gallery until the end of April.

Opening Reception: Saturday February 11th from 6-9pm

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:43:14 -0800

E6 Gallery / Robert Berman Gallery Presents

“Behold the cartoons in Go Fish: there is no more savage yet brilliant wit than that possessed by Mr. Fish, who will never compromise on his deep artistic insight or the outrageous honesty of his social commentary. In a sellout culture he is that rare witness for unfettered truth.” - Robert Scheer, Editor in Chief, truthdig and author of The Great American Stickup.

ROBERT BERMAN GALLERY is pleased to present the original drawings and unique multiples of Dwayne Booth aka Mr. Fish - political cartoonist and author of GO FISH (how to win contempt and influence people.)

In the appendix of his book, Mr. Fish dissects the journalistic responsibility he faces as a cartoonist to make it make sense. It being his raw emotional output in response to a given stimuli (government, society, et al) manifesting itself via pen on paper without regard to the cleverly pointed punchline that will accompany and ultimately define it. In his inaugural gallery show, he eschews that responsibility; the political cartoons hanging vulnerably on the walls in their original illustrated state, stripped of any captioning and absolute clarity. If the objective of a political cartoonist is to speak clearly than the goal of this exhibition is to express freely. The drawings are a celebration of the technical mastery and unbridled emotional truth of Dwayne Booth – the Clark Kent to Superman’s Mr. Fish.

Mr. Fish has been a freelance writer and cartoonist for eighteen years, publishing under both his real name (Dwayne Booth) and the penname of Mr. Fish with many of the nation’s most reputable and prestigious magazines, journals, and newspapers. In addition to his weekly cartoon for Harper’s and daily contributions to Truthdig, he has also contributed to the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the LA Weekly, the Atlantic, the Huffington Post, The Nation, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, the Advocate, Z Magazine, the Utne Reader, Slate.com, MSNBC.com, and others. He has also worked for National Public Radio. In May 2008 he was presented with a first place award by the Los Angeles Press Club for editorial cartooning. In May 2010 he was awarded the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Editorial Cartooning from the Society of Professional Journalists and most recently won the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Award in May of 2011. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and twin daughters.

Recent Press:

Interview with Mr. Fish on TruthDig.com

LA WEEKLY: Events

ARTWEEK.LA: Go Fish, Mr. Fish

HUFFINGTON POST: Finding Common Ground Through Art

NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS

###

For additional press information, interviews and images please contact:

E6 Gallery Director

Ashley Lauren Saks

ashleyseye@gmail.com

Closing Reception: Monday, January 30th from 7-10pm

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:21:00 -0800

Please join us for the closing reception for

Nathan Richard Pehlps Inside-Out & Through with guest DJ Jason Kendig from The Honey Soundsystem

Monday, January 30, 2012, 7-10pm

Show runs through February 4, 2012

Installation shots of Nathan Richard Phelps Inside-Out &...

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:46:31 -0800

Installation shots of Nathan Richard Phelps Inside-Out & Through. Show will be up until Monday, February 4th! Gallery hours are Thursday - Saturday from noon - 6pm.

Nathan Richard Phelps / Inside-out & Through / Fri. Jan 6th

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:58:00 -0800

Please join Friday for our opening for Nathan Richard Phelps’ show: Inside-out & Through

Opening Reception:

Friday, January 6, 2011, 6-9pm

January 6 – February 4, 2012

Robert Berman / E6 Gallery is pleased to present Inside-out & Through, a solo show with Bay Area artist Nathan Richard Phelps. Phelps’ geometric black and white drawings and installations magnetize viewers with a boldness and seduction that cannot be escaped. His process driven work begins with a line, and builds from there, with no predetermined outcome.

Phelps challenges himself to create a shared space in which he and the audience can join minds, even if only for a brief moment. He aims to rearrange the physical world to provide a glimpse into an invisible realm that exists in his subconscious, while referencing patterns we are all familiar with. Phelps’ hand across the canvas becomes a perfect expression of the moment he is experiencing. The work grows organically with time, often with hints of nature peering through. Phelps strives to make every mark immaculate to honor the perfect beauty in this world that he hopes to discover.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Often hiding just behind the ugly and flawed is a beauty that lies there, waiting to be discovered and liberated, shared and explored. When I’m lucky I can find this beauty through my work. I’ve developed an arts practice to be able to hone in on it, touch it occasionally and give it a home to live in. While the infinite possibilities of art keep stretching deeper into the mystery, it’s this beauty, which brings me back and keeps me nourished.

http://nathanrichardphelps.com/

Opening Reception for ELEVEN by Rob Setrakian

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:45:21 -0800

E6 Gallery / Robert Berman Gallery Presents

Rob Setrakian

ELEVEN

November 11th - December 31st, 2011

Opening Reception: 11/11/11 from 6-9pm

With Special Musical Performance by Sofi Rox from 7-9pm

OCTOBER 2011, SAN FRANCISCO, CA. — The temporal has an illusive, magical quality in art, relating to everything from the amount of time it takes to make a particular work to the sense of time that work creates in a viewer. Pure gestures born of the relationship between painter and materials, Rob Setrakian’s paintings possess timeless characteristics, yet he’s often invoked the momentary in the titles of his solo exhibitions, such as Chronologies, Current Destinations and last year’s show at Robert Berman/E6 Gallery, Present Tense.

In ELEVEN. Setrakian’s art reaches a new intensity and specificity in terms of time. “Sometimes as you walk down the path you look straight ahead and take in the moment and the future,” he says. “Then you look back and take in the moment and the past, on all levels. That is how it has felt in the studio this last go-round.” Through three collections of eleven (eleven oils on paper, eleven oils on canvas, and eleven monotypes) Setrakian brings his formidable skills as a painter to bear upon darkness and illumination, vitality and mortality. The result adds to a still-relevant tradition of Californian abstract expressionist painting while relating visually to the revived presence of poetry, particularly lyrical poetry, within the Bay Area.

While ELEVEN. marks a day when the calendar lines up a series of numerical ones — signaling beginnings — the show also collects paintings created by Setrakian since the death of significant loved ones, including his mentor Nathan Oliveira, who had a “profound” impact on his development from the point that they first worked together in Italy in 1986. Fittingly, ELEVEN. arrives in the immediate wake of an acclaimed exhibition of Oliveira’s last canvases (at John Berggruen Gallery), demonstrating that his spirit and influence remains alive. In life and on canvas, his fellow painter Setrakian passes through fatal scenes to develop character and a vivid sense of past, present, and future experience.

Vivid experiences are guaranteed at ELEVEN..’s opening reception, a momentous family affair where the unveiling of Setrakian’s art will be matched with an album-release performance by his daughter, the ukulele-based folk and pop singer-songwriter Sofi Rox. Many of the themes present in Setrakian’s paintings take melodic form in Sofi Rox’s music, which harkens back to Woody Guthrie while incorporating the sort of soulful, expressive vocalization normally found in torch songs. ELEVEN. doesn’t avoid what Setrakian calls the “death scenes” of painting, nor those of daily life. But it passes through them to discover opportunity and scenes of energetic activity. Join the artist and his daughter at a dynamic opening event on Friday, November 11th, or meditate upon his command of matter and light during the quieter weeks that follow

CONGRATULATIONS TO MARC FICHOU ON HIS PARTICIPATION AND SECOND...

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:16:00 -0700

CONGRATULATIONS TO MARC FICHOU ON HIS PARTICIPATION AND SECOND PLACE PRIZE FOR HIS “ORAGAMI SHARK” AT PHOTO REVIEW 2011!

Fichou’s works are currently on view at the University of the Arts Gallery in Philadelphia until October 21st and at E6 Gallery in San Francisco with Lauren Marsolier until November 5th.

Marc Fichou & Lauren Marsolier on view from September 24th -...

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 14:36:00 -0700

Marc Fichou & Lauren Marsolier on view from September 24th - November 5th

Marc Fichou, Plastron, 2010

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:50:00 -0700

Marc Fichou, Plastron, 2010

Recent Works by Lauren Marsolier and Marc Fichou

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:25:00 -0700

EXHIBITING HYPER-REAL AND HYBRID REALITIES

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 24th from 6pm–9pm

San Francisco, September 7, 2011 – On Saturday, September 24, 2011, E6 Gallery will celebrate the opening of Recent Works by Lauren Marsolier & Marc Fichou. In their first San Francisco exhibit, French artists Lauren Marsolier and Marc Fichou individually address what they describe as “the viewer’s relationship to viewing images.”

Responding to our present day simulated environments and realities, Marsolier creates photographic images that are intentionally suspect, capturing, as she states, “a place that does not exist, a place without a history.”

Unlike traditional photography, which seizes an instant of reality or a moment in time, Marsolier’s images are shot in different places and times over the course of several months, then layered and blended until the real and fabricated become a singularly unique image. The resulting hyper-real photographs feel like viewing a place we know, but can’t quite identify.

It is this sense of disorientation in Marsolier’s work that deliberately inclines the viewer to contemplate the images as one would a painting, while curiously suspecting their fabricated nature. By contrast, Fichou’s featured body of work compels viewers to re-establish their relationship to subject and medium.

Attempting to reunite matter and its image, Fichou creates works containing their own memory, a record or recording of the past, blended with their material surface. His meticulous attention to the alchemy of that which is and that which was, is as Fichou notes, “a means to explore the conflict between escaping the real through the image and anchoring oneself to the real through matter.”

In Fichou’s recent works, instead of providing a window to an elsewhere as images commonly do, Fichou creates his images as a way to bring viewer’s attentions back to the materiality of the present, to the here and now. Inextricably interweaving matter and its image by embedding photographs and videos within the very materials used to construct the imagery they depict, Fichou integrates a form of simultaneity into his artwork where images instead of detaching themselves from matter, reflect themselves upon it.

CIRCUMSPECT Closing Reception: September 9th from 7-9pm

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:53:41 -0700

Please join us for the closing reception for

CIRCUMSPECT: Jeff Charbonneau & Eliza French

September 9, 2011, 7-9pm

Show runs through September 14, 2011

Announcing Upcoming Show:

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:21:00 -0700

RECENT WORKS
by Lauren Marsolier and Marc Fichou
September 24 – November 5, 2011

Gallery Reception:
Saturday, September 24, 2011, 6-9pm

Art Business Review 7.30.11

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 13:11:13 -0700

Robert Berman / E6 Gallery: Circumspect - Jeff Charbonneau & Eliza French.

Review by RWM: Fantastic images of large imaginative landscapes. Magic globes pervade these incredible photographs. Here are fire balloons and spherical visitors while contemplative figures in the vicinity experience this otherworld.

Comment by AB: Photographs shot and developed with traditional film and darkroom techniques. Hard to believe, but every last detail of these chimerical compositions is staged. No Photoshop or digital manipulations whatsoever; these photographs are the results of pure painstaking logistics. You see exactly what the camera saw, and that’s what makes this show a winner. Stop on by.

Jeff Charbonneau & Eliza French photograph at Robert Berman / E6 Gallery.

Photography by Jeff Charbonneau & Eliza French.

Eliza French & Jeff Charbonneau and their photography.

Jeff Charbonneau & Eliza French photos at Robert Berman / E6 Gallery.

Jeff Charbonneau & Eliza French photographs.

Photograph by Jeff Charbonneau & Eliza French.

Fun with mylar balloons - Jeff Charbonneau & Eliza French photo show.

Prop used in Jeff Charbonneau & Eliza French photographs.

Jeff Charbonneau & Eliza French photos - Robert Berman / E6 Gallery.

***

A few Installation shots of CIRCUMSPECT by Jeff Charbonneau and...

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 19:25:00 -0700

A few Installation shots of CIRCUMSPECT by Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French

'Circumspect' in SF Chronicle's 96 Hours

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 12:50:00 -0700

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/27/NSL51KCRH7.DTL

Circumspect

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 23:01:00 -0700

Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French

Circumspect

July 30 – September 14, 2011

Gallery Reception:

Saturday, July 30, 6:00 to 8:00 pm
Robert Berman/E6 Gallery

1632 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94102

“Charbonneau and French’s work adds to the neo-dandy trajectory explored by such flamboyant self-documenting pairs as Pierre et Gilles, McDermott & McGough, and Gilbert and George. Now, however, dandyism has been given a noir edge.” -Peter Frank, On View

JUNE 2011, SAN FRANCISCO, CA. – Los Angeles based collaborating photographers Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French’s summer exhibition, Circumspect, at Robert Berman/E6 Gallery is a vigilant display of pure photography that invokes narratives reminiscent of Saki and Roald Dahl stories, or as previously described in Photograph magazine “Fellini’s take on Lewis Carroll.”

Circumspect, the duos’ first San Francisco exhibit, features 20 large-scale photographs from both Charbonneau and French’s Massillon series and their current Playground series.Utilizing traditional darkroom techniques (read: without Photoshop), and shooting with medium and large format film, Charbonneau and French’s photographs are rendered via meticulously executed installation staging and equally detail oriented post-production work.

Charbonneau explains, “Our images are essentially performance/installation stills, as we are very interested in capturing a real moment in time and adhering to the sentiments of traditional film based photography. As such, we prefer manipulating our images in a wet darkroom environment, rather than in the digital domain. In our Massillon series, where clouds are upside-down, or superimposed over a figure, the manipulations were done strictly in the darkroom using multiple negatives. In Playground we only retouched minor areas where the large orbs were tethered to the ground with small weights.” Charbonneau and French do, however, rely on digital technologies for the enlargement and printing process of their images. In the interest of maintaining consistency throughout their editions, large-scale exhibition prints are created using digital c-print technology based on their original silver gelatin masters.

Charbonneau’s twenty-year background in photography and in the motion picture and television industry, coupled with French’s background in screenwriting from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and Art History degree from UCLA, has created a partnership that consistently produces works that transport viewers to fanciful lands of visually interpreted imaginations, dreams, myths and memories. Ultimately, to discover oneself caught in the storybook narratives that unfold in the Massillon series or to experience Charbonneau and French’s Playground series, which will make you think differently about the alignment of the stars as you look into the night sky, brings to mind the fact that some pictures are worth a thousand words, or in the case of Charbonneau and French’s work, a thousand stories.

Massillon

Included in Circumspect are select works from Massillon, Charbonneau and French’s premiere body of work, which takes its name from the Ohio town where French’s great grandmother Zeta Eliza Woolley lived at the turn of the 20^th century.

Creating images with Victorian-era aesthetics and a 19^th century craftsmanship, combined with traditional black and white darkroom techniques and contemporary photographic processes, Massillon, for Charbonneau and French, “is a meditation on memory, and how it functions through the two of us, and between us.” Part of an unraveling narrative inspired by the life of French’s ancestor, Massillon reads as an archive of the artist’s memories, old family folklore, dreams and childhood reminiscence, transformed into works that have been described as “stills, it would seem, [from] an Edgar Allan Poe film adaptation by Ingmar Bergman.”

Playground

Playground, Charbonneau and French’s most current body of work, focuses on the study of primary shapes, in particular the sphere, and its literal and symbolic relationship to human subjects and the natural world. Notes French, “In these highly designed pictures we have strayed away from the emotionally driven narrative that characterized our previous series, Massillon, to create visual poetry through experiments with proportion, distance, and repetition in space.”

With the Playground series, Charbonneau and French have ventured into such realms of influence as classic mythology, Buckminster Fuller’s utopian communities, mid twentieth-century architectural sketches, Dava Sobel’s book, Planets, and their own childhood experiences with weather balloons. Set upon sweeping and stark landscapes, as if in a play-space one might comfortably reach into and rearrange on a whim, each photograph in Playground begins with the artists sculptural intervention into a found landscape or surface through the decisive placement of people and objects, such as large monochromatic spheres and diminutive and fanciful female figures, and concludes with performances, postures and arrangements captured on film that are often infused with elements of classical mythology and subtle references to the universe as created and manipulated by gods and goddesses of polytheistic times.

###

For additional press information, interviews and images please contact:

Ashley Lauren Saks: E6gallery@anet.net

Norris Communications

Wendy Norris (415) 307-3853 (cell), wendy@norriscommunications.biz

About Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French:

Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French have been working together since 2004 when a mutual interest in the photographic medium brought them together. Their performance-based images are created through a partnership from conception to finish, and have been exhibited nationally and internationally in group shows and art fairs since 2006, as well as featured in such international publications as Photograph Magazine, American Photo, and Photo +.

Charbonneau is a masterful printer working in traditional black and white darkroom technique. He attended the University of Wisconsin and UCLA for graduate studies where he studied music, anthropology and photography. He has divided his time between the motion picture and television industry and photography for twenty years. Eliza French studied screenwriting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and earned a degree in Art History from UCLA in 2001. In 2008 she became a full-time artist in collaboration with Charbonneau after working for several years in the entertainment and arts industries.

Charbonneau and French’s work is currently included in a traveling museum exhibition, “The Art of Caring: A Look at Life Through Photography,” which opened at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2008 and includes work by renowned photography luminaries as Sally Mann, Nan Goldin and Nicholas Nixon.

Charbonneau and French both live and work in Los Angeles.

For more information visit: http://www.sevensistersasleep.com/

Josh Graham “River of Time” Opening Pt.2 Photography...

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 12:04:11 -0700

Josh Graham “River of Time” Opening Pt.2

Photography by Patrick Kawahara

Josh Graham “River of Time” Opening...

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 11:55:19 -0700

Josh Graham “River of Time” Opening Pt.1

Photography by Taylor Keahey

Preview Images of A River of Time, Select Works by Josh...

Fri, 27 May 2011 13:17:00 -0700

Preview Images of A River of Time, Select Works by Josh Graham.

Come join us at our opening reception June 2nd, 7- 10 pm!

River of Time New works by Josh Graham June 2nd - 25th Opening...

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:44:00 -0700

River of Time

New works by Josh Graham

June 2nd - 25th

Opening Reception / June 2nd 7 - 10pm