Sam Lee Gallery is pleased to present "Nexus"—a summer group exhibition that opens July 14 and ends August 25, 2007. "Nexus" features artworks by eleven artists whose ideas are interconnected but are executed with different outcomes. This exhibition consists of photographs, paintings, works on paper and sculptures. The gallery will host a reception for the artists on Saturday, July 14, 7 - 9 pm. Exhibiting artists include Chris Barnard, Rebecca Clark, Chris Doyle, Darren Hostetter, Juanita Meneses, Pipo Nguyen-duy, Mary O'Malley, Macha Suzuki, Misato Suzuki, Devon Tsuno and Thúy-Vân Vu.
In the English dictionary, nexus is a connection or link that associates two or more people or things. In "Nexus," there are three groups of intersecting artists who work with similar ideas and themes, but produce varied results.
In the first group, Chris Doyle, Devon Tsuno and Thúy-Vân Vu all share an interest in investigating the notions of home and the urban environs. For New York-based Doyle, his exquisite watercolors of suburban homes and their outdoor accoutrements are created from memory, and comment on the isolation of domestic existence. Working from photographs often taken from late night prowls that transverse the city, Los Angeles-native Tsuno tackles and depicts with paint on panel the contrapuntal elements and phenomena that occur within the urban sprawl. Also working from photographs, Seattle-based Vu's recent paintings on paper explore rubble from a range of housing sites in the US and abroad; her interest lies in the notions of home, where ideas about cultural normativity and identity are enacted and challenged.
In the second group, Chris Barnard, Darren Hostetter, Juanita Meneses and Pipo Nguyen-duy all investigate the psychological effects and political mindsets of post-September 11 realities. Barnard's large narrative painting of a B2 Stealth Bomber flying over a football stadium during the kick-off, and Hostetter's acrylic on aluminum pieces of playful patterns of disincarnating helicopters from the sky, are both reminders of the destructive power that these war machines possess in the name of self-patriotism. At first glance, Meneses' oil-on-canvas captures an idyllic and picturesque San Diego beach, however upon closer inspection, her seascape illustrates an undertone of homeland security paranoia that plagues the Tijuana border. Nguyen-duy's photographic series of the abandoned greenhouses in northern Ohio questions the historical depiction of the North American landscape as a "Garden of Eden" and re-frames it within a post-September 11 perspective.
In the final group, Rebecca Clark, Mary O'Malley, Macha Suzuki and Misato Suzuki are each fascinated by nature in all of its complexity and richness. Whereas Clark works directly from nature by collecting leaves in various stages of disintegration and drawing them with the utmost details, O'Malley finds inspiration from the wild side of nature and employs a hybrid of sources, rendering ink drawings of fecund abundance that are part fantasy and part reality. Both Macha Suzuki and Misato Suzuki (not related) make sculptures and paintings, respectively, from life experiences and transform them through make-believe and exaggeration, thus altering the original contexts of their experiences into whimsical yet open-ended storytelling.