The exhibition recently had a very positive review in the Denver Post, “Artist Mindy Bray’s Wide View of the New West”, written by Ray Mark Rinaldi. From the article:

In a way, Bray has unsettled the landscape, turned back the clock. Her paintings are not prehistoric, but they appear pre-logging, pre-highway, pre-subdivision. That allows her to explore them in a fresh and uncomplicated way.

With the exhibit at Rule, Bray takes her world to an even richer dimension. In addition to the works hanging on the wall, she has linked a large-scale, site-specific painting created directly on the wall. It is a giant mess of a map that begs to be reconstructed by the viewer, then identified and located among the lands we Westerners love to drive, hike and raft through. But it’s impossible really; there aren’t enough landmarks to place it.

It’s in the fun of trying, and the frustration of failing, that Bray’s point of view becomes clear. Everything we see can’t be ordered, conquered. Sometimes we must be content just seeing it. These works sacrifice the beauty that is often contained in landscape paintings and photographs and in exchange give us a lesson in looking.

You can view the entire article online here.

The exhibition will open March 9 from 6-9, and will run through April 21. Here is my statement for the show, hope to see you all there.

“The geography of looking” consists of a group of paintings on paper and a site-specific painting on the gallery wall that present a systematic description of the experience of landscape, both physical and psychological. Images of mountain environments are reduced to fragmented fields that require both a slowed reading and an expansive awareness. Each of the paintings is a frame within a larger narrative; the site-specific painting provides the key, the overall map and context for these individual moments. All of the paintings are an investigation into how the mind reflects our surrounding environment, filtered through our biology, personal experience, and cultural knowledge.

Geography is a method for understanding and navigating our environment; these paintings present the process of systemizing visual experience in order to navigate a complicated natural world. Drawn from photographs of Western landscapes in Colorado and Utah, the paintings address the complex arena of visual beauty, psychological states, and the history and culture of the land that are all a part of the experience of nature. Through color and materials, the paintings evoke romantic notions of the West, including beauty, freedom and spirituality, and then, through careful dissection, they are pulled apart to reveal their inner concrete workings.

Here is an excerpt:

Many of Mindy’s subjects are found in nature and, even when reduced to the point that the original subject is no longer immediately apparent, possess a clear organic quality. Be it a muddled mound of trash or an autumn forest floor, the original subject retains significance even after being reduced to solid shapes.

“The subject of the photograph adds a layer of meaning to the paintings, as well as a particular shape quality,” Mindy explains, “When there is a sense of recognition in the images, it adds the deja’ vu feeling I am interested in – something familiar presented in an unfamiliar way. It is like an epiphany”

I just finished a new painting, Forest Floor, the third in a group of paintings that will be shown at Rule Gallery this Spring, as part of my first solo exhibition at the Denver gallery, The Geography of Looking. I am planning for the show to have a smattering of some of the modes in which I work: large stretched paintings, very small daily paintings, and a wall painting. I am especially excited to see how the wall painting may interact with the stretched works, since I have never seen the two paired together in the same space. I will be looking to create a sense of continuity between the two, perhaps even creating a larger, overall image. The exhibition is scheduled for March-April, so I have the next few months to put things together.

Forest for the Trees, 110 ft. x 22.5 ft., latex on wall

Installed at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art

I recently completed a new site-specific piece for the UICA in Grand Rapids, Michigan, titled Forest for the Trees. The opening reception was on Monday, July 25, corresponding with the opening gala for the beautiful new building that I had the opportunity to work in. Here is my statement for the piece:

Forest for the Trees is a large-scale painting that directly addresses the visibility of the Ramp Project Space from the facing street to create an image that is simultaneously interior and exterior. Drawing on photographic imagery of tree shadows, as well as actual tracings of shadows collected in downtown Grand Rapids, the painting creates a connection between the interior wall and the phenomena of light and landscape on the exterior of the building. The scale of the wall and the experience of moving through the space are emphasized through forced perspective, which enhances the sense of the height of the wall, and the narrative composition, which is revealed as the viewer progresses along the length of the painting. In both of these ways, the painting is continually referring back to the architecture. The shadow images are reduced to a single color and value in order to create ambiguity in the reading the shapes, and the color was chosen to create the feeling of temperature, a cool shaded area inviting viewers from the exterior. The title, Forest for the Trees, refers to the scale of the painting and the viewer’s inability to see the entire image from any single vantage point. Conceptually, however, the overarching image is apparent, the appearance that the natural world is inhabiting the building, creating ambiguity between interior and exterior, natural and built environments.

For more information on the exhibition, please visit the UICA website. Coming soon, there will also be a video interview available on YouTube produced by UICA.

A photo of the work in progress was on the front page of the Entertainment section of the Grand Rapids Press on Sunday, July 24. To read the article, please visit the Press website.

Also, I recently learned that my work was accepted to the online, curated artist registry of White Columns, an exhibition space in New York. Please visit their website to see my portfolio.

My work was highlighted in two recent articles in the Denver Post.

The first was a review by Kyle MacMillan of the current exhibition, One Hundred Days: the Online Collaborative at Hinterland, published Friday, May 20, 2011.
From the article:

Bray, among the best of a new generation of Denver artists, deconstructs natural and built landscape in unexpected ways in paintings and installations, exploring light and dark and positive and negative space. She is showing 25 5-by-7-inch drawings – quickly executed yet smartly realized works with an appealing freshness and immediacy.

The second article, also written by Kyle MacMillan, was a two-part series for the Denver Post recognizing the top 12 artists in Colorado 35 and under. Titled Art’s New View: the 12 best Colorado artists 35 and under, this exciting and generous piece included other great local artists, including Nathan Abels and Monique Crine, both of whom I’ve shown with here in Denver.
From the article:

Residence: Denver
Media: Painting, drawing and installation
Why we like her: Experiments with positive-negative space are age-old, but Bray manipulates the dichotomy in fresh ways, exploring the ambiguous realm between abstraction and representation.
Art-world cred: Residency, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass, 2009
Her take: My current paintings on paper draw their imagery from photographs of the landscape, suburbia, industrial parks and other everyday environments. I use these images as templates for a meticulous process of fragmentation, creating a complex field of small shapes that may or may not be recognizable but, instead, are enigmatic representations of our environment.
Influences: Agnes Martin, Cornelia Parker, Thomas Nozkowski
Art today: What I see in my peers is a turn away from large subjects, such as political and social issues, and large scales, including bright colors and slick materials, in favor of personal subjects, modest scales and an idiosyncratic visual language.

To read the entire article, follow this link.

One Hundred Days: The Online Collaborative opened Friday, May 13 at Hinterland in Denver. We had a great turnout, beautiful weather, and a positive reception. Here is my press release for the show:

One Hundred Days brings together seven artists from across the county who participated in the online collaborative project 100 days during the summer of 2010. The project, begun by painter Carianne Mack Garside in 2008, creates a platform for participants to engage in creative production every day for 100 days and then share their individual projects with the community, creating a network of momentum and motivation. Interdisciplinary and democratic, each participant defines their individual project within the framework, with disciplines ranging from video and drawing to poetry and cooking, and backgrounds ranging from professional artists to inspired spouses. Daily practice and interactivity draws the work together as each individual act becomes tied to the group and necessarily influenced by it. The project will continue this summer, beginning in late May of 2011, and the exhibition will serve as a hub for inviting new participants.

This was my first curatorial project, and I enjoyed receiving the work and installing the gallery. The artists include myself, Carianne Mack Garside, Neha Bawa, Steve Ersinghaus, Claudine Metrick. Carol Mack, Jessica Somers and John Timmons. The exhibition will continue through June 11, and will be open for First Friday on June 3, and from 12-5 on June 11 as part of the annual RiNo art district tour.

Here are a few more installation photos of the show.