& Shawn McNulty">Getting To Know Tara Costello & Shawn McNulty

Getting To Know… is a monthly article we will be publishing along with our monthly exhibitions at Rosalux to give you the chance to get to know our exhibiting artists a little bit better. In this first installment we sat down with our currently exhibiting artists Shawn McNulty and Tara Costello to find out what is going on with them and their art and here is what they had to say:

Who are your biggest influences as an artist?

McNulty: Rothko/Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, and Richard Diebenkorn

Costello: All of my artist friends.

What are you doing when you are not making art?
Costello: Trying to figure out a way to be spending more time in the studio

McNulty: I like watching movies and binging on seasons of tv shows on dvd.  I also take my dog for walks and throw the ball for him numerous times per day.

Tara Costello, Plane, Venetian Plaster, 2012, 4′x4′

Can you tell us about the moment in your life when you realized you were no longer a student of art but an artist and how that transition occurred for you?

Costello: I think it was when I had my first show at Rosalux Gallery.I had other shows in other galleries but for some reason I knew at that time, I was committed to making being an artist work for me.

McNulty: I was living in a large house in Uptown with some friends after college.  When one of them moved out, I turned their bedroom into a studio and started working on four large paintings.  I believe it was during this process.

Where was your first show outside of university?

McNulty: It was at Rosalux Gallery in the Fall of 2002.

Costello: Apropos Painting Studio,group show.

Shawn McNulty, Scrubble, 2012,  acrylic & pumice on canvas, 40×40″

How do you get from the first spark of an idea to a finished work for exhibition?  Where do your ideas come from?

McNulty: I begin very spontaneously by mixing various colors and pumice on the canvas, and then forcing everything together with large palette knives.  I keep going with this process until I find something interesting, and a lot of the ideas come from the forms that take shape in the negative space.

Costello: I just start painting, there are many spark and non spark moments,I just keep painting until it’s done,it just happens.

What has been the most rewarding moment in your career so far?

McNulty: I completed a 20 piece commission for a business in Michigan in 2011, and they gave me total creative freedom on the project.

Tara Costello,Flashing Red (detail), Venetian Plaster 2011, 3′x3′

What do you feel you have accomplished with this newest body of work currently on exhibit at Rosalux?

Costello: I wanted to explore a different landscape than my past work.

McNulty: This body of work is  strong example of my signature style, along with pushing the boundaries on the looseness of my abstract landscapes.  I’m also experimenting with  some free floating forms that don’t go to the edge of the canvas.

What is the most embarrassing thing to have happened to you at an art opening?

McNulty: Every time I try to take a photo with Dan Buettner at an art opening, his eyes are closed.
Costello: I hug people to much.

Shawn McNulty, Stallion, 2012,  acrylic & pumice on canvas, 40×40″

What is your favorite word?

McNulty: Kerfuffle
Costello: Czechoslovakia

What do you wish people would say about your art?

McNulty: People often say that they recognize my art right away, and that’s probably the best compliment.
Costello: Any serious  conversation about my work,positive or not is always fulfilling.

If you had a $1,000,000 budget, what would you create?

Costello: I would build an amazing studio on the water.
McNulty: I would do giant paintings on the side of buildings, or a large Forkbridge and Strawberry sculpture.

What is coming up next for you?

Costello: Grant writing.
McNulty: My studio at the Thorp Building will be open for Art-A-Whirl, and I have a show in the main gallery of the Bloomington Art Center in January.

Tara and Shawn’s work will be on display at Rosalux Gallery in the exhibition, Flashing Red, through April 29th

Flashing Red: Opening Reception Photos

Here is a collection of opening reception photos by Chloe Briggs from Flashing Red: Tara Costello and Shawn McNulty from April 7th, 2012

Rosalux Artist Amy Toscani’s Latest Show Reviewed In Minneapolis Star Tribune

Check out this article reviewing the work of Amy Toscani on display at the SOO Visual Arts Center until May 20th:

Pot Luck

Article by: MASON RIDDLE
Updated: April 12, 2012 – 3:31 PM

Twin Cities sculptor Amy Toscani puts a Midwest spin on mixed media.

Amy Toscani may well be the original material girl. For the Twin Cities artist, no material or found object is too banal. Asphalt, plastic, polyester, pipe cleaners, inflatable toys, dog sweaters — all harbor as much potential as steel, stone, wood or paint.

Since Toscani first installed her work at Franconia Sculpture Park in the late 1990s, her outsized, quirky, even clumsy sculptures, sporting bright colors, weird shapes and unconventional appendages, have attracted a devoted fan base. Her pastel-hued “Molecule,” which dominates the front lawn of the University of Minnesota’s Molecular and Cellular Biology Building along Washington Avenue SE., injects humor into science while suggesting a jungle gym for Brobdingnagians. Similarly the red-and-blue “Muscle,” equal parts whirligig and vegetable on legs, has presided with goofy authority over the St. Paul Farmers Market (currently it’s in St. Paul’s Western Sculpture Park because of light-rail construction).

Her new exhibit “Body Double” at SooVAC features work on a much smaller scale, but the aesthetic recipe of mundane materials, changing scale, cultural puns and off-key humor is here in force.

She describes her new mixed-media works as investigations of Americana, “embodiments of Midwestern living.” In its synthesis of materials, form and personal narrative, Toscani’s work makes blunt and opaque references to small-town parades and rural living, the culture of kitsch, the innocence of childhood, the impact of aging, how artifice is confused with reality, even queer culture. They seem to raise more questions about their exact identity than they answer. At its most elemental level, the work is a collage of Toscani’s past and present, a sort of idiosyncratic self-portrait animated through materials.

“Tableaux,” for example, is a miniature parade float, adorned with white fringe and garish plastic decoration in vivid hues. But instead of hosting celebs, athletes or contestants waving to the crowd, the float is affixed with a child’s inflatable seesaw, a small playground ladder and four little leather boxing gloves.

“Leisure Suit” was inspired by homemade potholders. Ungainly but humorous, its tall, welded loom-like armature, whose shape defies description, is embedded in an asphalt base and woven with strips of polyester fabric in such colors as taupe, turquoise, black and orange. Although “Leisure Suit” has no function, it still evokes a do-it-yourself craft sensibility, and magnifies the term “lowbrow.”

Equally vague is a small, colorful, three-legged work titled “Patsy.” Made from recycled and melted plastic objects such as a child’s sled, Kool-Aid pitchers and recipe boxes, it projects a familiarity, but of what?

In “Somebody Else’s Self-Portrait” a figurative form wears a red dog sweater. Its bulbous head, made of black and white pipe cleaners, is a reference to the artist’s graying hair.

More overt is “Butch Girl.” At 10 feet tall, the painted plywood Dutch girl cutout, wooden shoes and all, is a lesbian riff on the iconic Dutch Boy Paints image that parodies the statues found at amusement parks and cultural sites where one inserts one’s face into an opening. Here, in a twisted but effective commentary, the opening is in the “Butch Girl’s” crotch.

Although provocative, the show seems more a collection of visual ruminations or sculptural sketches than completed works. More like ideas in the making, “Leisure Suit” and “Tableau” are engaging on first take, but their content or raison d’être is too opaque to resonate over time. “Butch Girl” is the exception. Here, Toscani effectively fuses her cultural critique to the appropriate materials and execution to create a smart, resolved work.

Scale has its own power, and “Butch Girl” succeeds, in part, because of its size. Similarly, scale plays a big role in the effectiveness of Toscani’s large outdoor pieces. It is not an intellectual stretch to envision “Muscle” and “Molecule” as crazy cousins to Minnesota’s towering Paul Bunyan or giant-walleye statues, a sort of inverted underbelly of American roadside culture.

Jack Dale at the Bloomington Art Center

The newest member to Rosalux Gallery, Jack Dale, will be exhibiting work at the Bloomington Art Center from April 13 – May 18, 2012 in and exhibit titled Marking Moments. The opening reception for the exhibition will be held on the 13th of April from 6pm until 8pm. More information about the exhibit can be found at the Bloomington Art Center’s exhibition page, here:

http://www.bloomingtonartcenter.com/Pages/Exhibitions.htm

Val Jenkins and Asia Ward receive Minnesota State Arts Board Grant

The Artist Initiative Grant was awarded to both Asia and Val for 2012-13.

http://www.arts.state.mn.us/grants/2012/2012-awarded-ai.htm

Flashing Red: Tara Costello & Shawn McNulty | Press Release | April 2012

Contemporary painters Shawn McNulty and Tara Costello present new, large-scale pieces that reexamine the quotidian, adding new context and meaning to spaces and occurrences, which previously seemed commonplace. The work invites the viewer to find new perspectives; McNulty’s vibrant colors and Costello’s rich black palette reveal newness in the familiar, as well as unexpected connections between abstract forms. Both artists are Rosalux veterans (McNulty is a founding member) showing together for the first time.

McNulty Statement:
My work is dependent on design fundamentals: form, color, and composition. My style explores the relationship between man-made structures and the natural world; the idea of recognizable shapes and structures living within irrational thoughts and emotions. I begin a new piece very spontaneously and become more detailed as the composition starts to show itself. The first layers are the most erratic and freeform, similar to automatic writing. I use large, commercial grade palette knives. A dialogue is created with the painting, and it starts to show me what needs to be done. My newer work has taken on more of a simplified composition, coming across as abstract landscapes or all-over color fields. I put down the brush and started working exclusively with large commercial grade palette knives around 2008, which had a dramatic effect on my work. I invented a “shoe palette knife” which I use on early layers to challenge the way my body connects to the surface. Thick layers of acrylic and pumice and are applied, scraped off, reapplied, sliced off, etc. There’s a technique I call “scuffling” which involves a repetitive chopping motion with the palette knife resulting in approximate parallel lines. The color fields interplay with each other, attempting to find common ground resulting in complex and interesting edges. The process continues until a solution is found, always applying and mixing paint directly on the canvas, scraping away layers to reveal the ghostly characters of the previous. It’s no mystery that I am influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, and I am combining some of the aspects of action and color field painting.

Costello Statement:
My paintings examine unfamiliar spaces and the emotive power of the interplay of forms. Layers of Venetian plaster and raw pigment build up to create uncanny spaces in which viewers are called to find unexpected beauty in the relationships between rich textures and primitive marks. I aim to create spaces with variable contexts and perspectives, some hidden from sight, and some starkly unconcealed. While my work at times emulates or alludes to landscape, it is the landscape of emotional experience rather than a reflection of any specific time or place. The spaces in these paintings stem from my own experiences, but the work is more focused on the ineffable pleasure of simply entering into unfamiliar territory, finding new viewpoints, and seeking out new connections. The work is created spontaneously and experimentally. It also invites an improvisational engagement between itself and the viewer. My newer work seeks to move further into abstraction by limiting my palette to primarily black and eliminating previously employed points of reference such as horizon lines. Instead, simpler geometrical shapes are etched into black backgrounds to allow the sumptuous layers of plaster to reveal their own latent truths and to further confound any attempt to maintain a fixed (limited) perspective.

Exhibit runs: April 5th-29th, 2012
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 7th, 2012, 7-11 PM
Preview: Thursday, April 5th, 2012, 5-9 PM

Terrence Payne featured on MNOriginal

Click the link below to view Terrence Payne’s MN Original segment which was also featured on the PBS NewsHour blog.

http://www.mnoriginal.org/episode/terrence-payne-2/

10th Anniversary Exhibition Photos

Here are photos from the 10th Anniversary Exhibition taken by Chloe Briggs.

“Absurdities Crept In”, Terrence Payne, Jennifer Davis and Mark Nelson at Gray Duck Gallery, Austin, TX

This month Rosalux Gallery Director and founding member Terrence Payne  is showing some beautiful new colored pencil drawings in the show “Absurdities Crept In” at  Gray Duck Gallery in Austin, TX . The show also features wonderful work from painter  Mark Nelson and former Rosalux member Jennifer Davis. Gray Duck posted images from the show on its website so you can check it here: http://www.grayduckgallery.com/exhibition_Absurdities.html. If you are down in the Austin area before April 1st,  when the show closes, stop in and check it out.

CityPages reviews the 10th Anniversary Exhibition at Rosalux

CityPages writer Sheila Regan provides a nice write up of the opening reception of the 10th Anniversary Exhibition marking Rosalux’s landmark decade. The article can be read here

http://blogs.citypages.com/dressingroom/2012/03/rosalux_celebrates_10_years_as_an_artist_cooperative.php

Rosalux is the longest running artist-cooperative gallery in Minneapolis. The 10th Anniversary Exhibition can be seen at Rosalux until the 31st of March.